Keith R. Fisher

I have been reading Fanfare almost since its beginning. Music was my first “love.” As a toddler, I would sit and listen for hours to my grandfather play the piano. He had studied at the Boston Conservatory and went on to play with the Big Bands in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. He also played piano at interludes on the radio and was a personal friend of many classical musicians, ranging from Arturo Toscanini to Andre Kostelanetz (my grandmother sat in the back with Mrs. Toscanini at NBC Symphony concerts).

When, at age five, I began to fool around at the keyboard, my grandfather bought me a piano of my own. Shortly thereafter, I began studying piano and music theory at Juilliard. Like so many piano students, I detested practicing boring scales, so my canny teachers would find music I really wanted to play that was—in a coincidence that would have shocked Claude Rains in Casablanca—chock full of scales, arpeggios, broken chords, and the like.

Impatient with Grandpa’s collection of stacks of 78s (Toscanini’s Beethoven, Bruno Walter’s Brahms, Gieseking’s Debussy), I began collecting LPs when I was 8. Growing up in New York City provided ready access to frequent record sales at Sam Goody’s and Chambers Music!

I went on to get a degree in music theory and composition from Princeton University, at a time when Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and a host of other distinguished composer-theorists were on the faculty (including a young instructor named Paul Lansky, later a pioneer in computer-generated music), to say nothing of brand name musicologists like Arthur Mendel, J. Merrill Knapp, and Lewis Lockwood. Even Roger Sessions, though retired, would teach the occasional seminar. I performed regularly in solo recitals, with chamber ensembles and orchestra, and as an accompanist for dance recitals and singers. Milton Babbitt was the adviser for my thesis, which consisted of a set of canonic variations for piano, songs for two sopranos and piano, and a piece for solo clarinet. I also wrote some music criticism (concert and opera performances, not recordings).

Unlike Robert Frost in his famous poem, I abandoned the road less traveled. Uncertain that I wanted to try to eke out a living as a classical composer, I went to law school. I practiced law (in what is nowadays affectionately called “big law”) for many years before becoming a law professor. Now, with many publications in law reviews and other periodicals and two somewhat unwieldy treatises to my name, I have segued to teaching trial and appellate judges all over the world.

In 2023 I came out of “retirement” and performed music by Haydn, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Scriabin, and Debussy at the Athens Conservatory (where Maria Callas studied). I plan to continue performing periodically. When the opportunity to write for Fanfare presented itself, I jumped at the chance to return to music criticism at my favorite classical music publication.