Max E. Keller

Born in Aarau on 19 March 1947; Max E. Keller is a composer, jazz pianist and improvising musician. He studied musicology, German literature and history, composition with Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Helmut Lachenmann and Nicolaus A. Huber, and electronic music with Dirk Reith and Thomas Kessler, and held a scholarship from the Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung of the Südwestfunk. From 1966 to 1973, as one of the first free jazz musicians in Switzerland, he played free jazz and improvised music based on concepts on the piano and on electronic instruments; since 1973 he has composed for the most varied instrumental combinations, including electronic music. He has often set political texts, as in “Gesänge II” after Erich Fried, “Gesänge III” after Jürg Weibel and “Gesänge IV” after Kurt Marti, in the evening-length scenic cantata “Fontamara” after Ignazio Silone and in the miniature opera “Egon – aus dem Leben eines Bankbeamten” after Hans Suter; he wrote the chamber opera “Die Axt” from 2004 to 2006 on a commission from the Komische Oper Berlin. From 1985 to 2014 he shaped the music programme of the Theater am Gleis in Winterthur, from 1999 until the 2024/25 season he directed the concert series musica aperta Winterthur, which he had founded, and from 2007 to 2010 he was president of ISCM Switzerland. In 1985 he represented Switzerland at the Biennale Berlin, and in 1991 and 1993 at the ISCM World Music Days in Zurich and in Mexico. In 1997 he received the art prize of the Carl-Heinrich-Ernst-Stiftung Winterthur, and in 1999 the Berlin scholarship. On the Cybele album ex machina Vol. 4 – The Seventies (2001) he is represented with “Sie” (1978) for tape with the speaker Hans Suter, initially a piece of ironic advertising music for nuclear energy: the bombastic sequences of the first part were created with a sequencer that was new at the time in the studio of the Musik-Akademie Basel, while he largely improvised the music of the second part at home on everyday objects, partly recorded with contact microphones and slightly transformed with his EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer.