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Keenan Reesor

About this Artist

Dr. Keenan A. Reesor is a pianist, professor, and musicologist, equally at home in the concert hall, classroom, and archive. Of his pre-concert lecture and ensuing performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third with the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, the South Coast Today reported that he displayed “depth and erudition... and the down-to-earth humility and warmth that later infused his brilliant technical mastery of the piano with soul force and heart.”  

As a scholar, Dr. Reesor specializes in the music and reception of Sergei Rachmaninoff, with broader interests in reception history, canonicity, and Russian music and musicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research has taken him to archives at the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Glinka Russian Museum of Musical Culture, the Moscow Conservatory, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia. He presents regularly at national and international conferences on Russian music and culture, and his articles have been published by Rachmaninoff’s Estate-Museum “Ivanovka” and the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. 

As a pianist, Dr. Reesor has performed across the United States and in England, Austria, Hungary, and Russia. In addition to New Bedford, he has soloed with the symphony orchestras of Cheyenne, Downey, and Fort Collins. He is also an avid chamber musician and has appeared in recital with tenor Stanford Olsen, violinist William Hagen, cellist Jonathan Karoly (LA Phil), and flutist Catherine Ransom Karoly (LA Phil). He is a double laureate of the Palm Springs International Piano Competition and a former nominee for the American Pianists Association Classical Fellow Award. 

Dr. Reesor currently serves as Associate Professor of Music and Director of Keyboard Studies at Southern Virginia University, teaching music history and piano. He holds graduate degrees in musicology and piano from the University of Southern California. He lives in Buena Vista, Virginia, with his wife, Nonie, and their five boys.