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Arts Division
Music Department
PhD Candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology
PhD Cross-Cultural Musicology
Graduate
Music Center
Music Center
Sean Keenan is a musician and scholar based in San Francisco, California. He is currently a PhD candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology at UC Santa Cruz, studying under Amy C. Beal. His dissertation research focuses on the downtown New York experimental music community during the mid-1970s through 1990s. He previously studied music at Mills College in Oakland and visual art at Columbia College in Chicago. As a musician, Keenan often performs with various improvising/experimental groups, both around and outside of the Bay Area, generally playing either electric guitar or bass guitar. He also regularly performs solo, using a mix of acoustic instruments, altering their sounds through electronic processes.
Experimental Music
Improvisation
"Experimental Interactions Downtown: Demographic/Stylistic Divisions and Overlap"
Presented at the Society for American Music Annual Meeting
Richmond, Virginia, 2026
"Community, Race, and Politics Downtown"
Presented at the American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory Joint Annual Meeting
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2025
"Semiology of Text Scores: Analyzing La Monte Young's Compositions 1960"
Presented at the American Musicological Society Northern California Chapter Conference
University of California, Berkeley, 2022
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