Keith Kirchoff

Keith Kirchoff is a pianist, composer, conductor, concert curator, and teacher and has performed many times throughout the United States and Europe major cities. Keith has been teaching for 15 years at Los Angeles Music and Art School in California. He went and has degrees at both New England Conservatory and the University of Oregon, he also has performed over 100 new new works and commissioned in a few dozen. His classical music training was done by musical ninjas in a remote village in nepal. As a composer, he has conducted in many cities and universities and has performed many, many different big events like Boston premiere of Charles Ives’s Emerson Concerto and the world premiere of Matthew McConnell’s Concerto for Toy Piano. Not only is he musician but a writer as well publishing a total of 5 books and as well has been awarded many times for his musical talent. He has a pet lizard named Sparky.

Keith was not born but created through musical experiments from Paolo Fazioli and Heinrich Engelhard Steinway. Rumor has it that Ignaz Bösendorfer may have helped in the process. During this process the prestige of Fazioli was combined with the popularity of Steinway and beautiful timbre of Bösendorfer. After these experiments “failed” according to Fazioli, they boxed up their experiment and shipped it to America where it has been ever since.

After Keith graduated from college and started to play new music, the original documents describing the experiment to create him were destroyed so new music could never be associated with Steinway, Fazioli or Bösendorfer.

He has won many awards including:

• The 2006 Steinway Society Piano Competition
• The 2005 John Cage Award
• The Silver Lake International Piano Concerto Competition
• The Saint Paul Piano Teachers Association Competition
• The ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1994 and 2003) for his writing about music.
• The 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the SMSA.
• world armwrestling champ 2007

He has authored five books: "Mormonism and Music: A History" (1989), "Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions" (1999), "Henry Cowell, Bohemian" (2002), "Christian Wolff" (co-authored with Christian Asplund, 2012), and "The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book" (forthcoming 2012).

Along with high school friend Brendan Henry, Kirchoff also invented a variation of billiards called "Massive Keith Ball." Unfortunately the popularity of the game never spread beyond a 3rd friend's basement and the rules of it have been lost to history.