Sad News: Allan Keiler
March 3 2024
Dear Colleagues,
I write to share the sad news that Professor Emeritus of Music, Allan Keiler, passed away on Monday, February 26, 2024 at NewBridge on the Charles in Dedham at the age of 85. Professor Keiler was born in Cleveland on November 8, 1938. His father, Arthur, was a clothes merchant and his mother, Pearl, a homemaker. He arrived at Brandeis University in 1975 and retired in 2017 at the age of 78.
Best known as a music theorist, Professor Keiler published a series of articles challenging conventional views of Schenker, the relationship of linguistic theory to music, and psychoanalysis and music. Having studied linguistics with Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University, putting Allan in a position that few music theorists could claim to probe and comprehend: the affinity between the two disciplines. In 2014 he received the Julius Silberger Award for Interdisciplinary Work in Psychoanalysis and delivered the Silberger lecture, “Liszt as Romantic Hero: Imposturing and the False Self.” He also exercised his historian’s skills to write a thoroughly researched biography of American contralto Marian Anderson. It was a work of love, and he was able to cap it with two visits to Miss Anderson as she lay in her bed, just weeks from her death. At the 2019 meeting of the American Musicological Society, Carol Oja, Harvard Professor of American studies, named Allan’s book as the foundation of modern Marian Anderson studies.
Allan conversed fluently and effortlessly in French, and read Latin, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Romanian, German, Yiddish, and Hungarian. His eminent mentor Roman Jakobson entrusted him with the translation of Kindersprache, Aphasia, und allgemeine Lautgesetze (Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals), and Allan also published a study of his own on Indo-European laryngeals. As a consequence of his reputation as one of music theory’s most provocative thinkers, he held from time-to-time visiting lectureships at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities.
As a musician, Allan was an energetic pianist and studied piano with teachers at the University of Michigan and at the University of Chicago. Once he performed Mozart K. 452 with a quartet of wind players at Brandeis, and his pianism was worthy of the work. Allan had a huge record collection and knew every work of the standard repertory, and every performer.
As a pedagogue, Allan was enormously influential on a generation of Brandeis Ph.D.’s. Musicologists and composers sought him out as a mentor. His graduate seminars were legendary adventures in critical thinking about music, and his graduate students were regularly awed by his provocative brilliance. In 2010 he was recognized for this work with the Dean of Arts and Sciences Mentoring Award. Whether teaching graduate students or undergraduates, his goal was to explain the subject, share his passion for it, and appreciate his students’ difficulties with sympathy and understanding. It was this passion for teaching that kept him in the classroom until the age of 78.
Allan Keiler was predeceased by his sister Carol, who died in 2008, and is survived by cousins Sandra Vendeland, Kalman Krause, and Arnold Krause.
Plans are forthcoming for a memorial gathering in Allan's honor.
I am grateful to Eric Chasalow of the Department of Music and to Edward Nowacki, professor emeritus of musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, and Brandeis Ph.D. in musicology (1980), for their contributions to this memoriam.
Sincerely,
Carol A. Fierke
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs