Musician’s mashup of identities defies genre
By Bill Gallo 
| August 6, 2009 | 8:01 AM
Composer Conrad Kehn once wrote, "If classical music is dying, let's help kill it." (Photo by Marilyn Marsh)
MacroCephalic Boy is retired. At least for the time being. The glowering lead singer of Skull Flux is dead, because Skull Flux is dead. The 4-year-old singing solos in the choir loft back home in Gering, Neb.? All grown up now.
But if you need the computer geek who makes house calls to fix your music software, don’t worry. He’s still with us. So is the trained classicist who loves Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. And the contrarian who declares: “If classical music is dying, let’s help kill it.” And the restless post-modernist who embraces the Beatles and Tom Waits, the pregnant semi-silences of John Cage and the electronic pan-Arabism of Muslimgauze, the calculated junkyard noise of Einsturzende Neubaten and the free-jazz piano of Cecil Taylor.
Also, the composer who feels free to mix and match (or totally ignore) all of the above whenever he feels like it.
Truth be told, these identities — and more — all co-exist in one man. He is Conrad Kehn, a burly, outspoken 37-year-old lecturer at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music whose seeming contradictions add up to a vivid life in the arts and higher education.
“I’m all over the map,” Kehn says cheerfully.
In another previous mini-life (1997-2004) he was a manager/buyer at Denver’s fabled Twist n’ Shout Records, where he found himself in such a rich stew of sonic influences that “I knew that for me, as a maker of music, there would never be just one way. If I’m going to create, I want it to be new all the time. In the hundreds of years of musical history and tradition, the idea of improvising is not new. But the outcome always is.”
In the 1990s, Kehn earned two degrees in music from DU and has been on the Lamont faculty since 2000, teaching classes in theory, composition and music technology. His own pieces — including Maximinimal and Elegy — combine electro-acoustic and multimedia experiment, improvisational rock and computer manipulations; they have been performed all over the United States and in Russia. He collaborates with dozens of other musicians and composers (among them Wu Fei, Brandon Vaccaro and the jazz-inflected group Rhythmic Void) and directs the Lamont Composers Concert Series.
Kehn’s primary vehicle, however, is The Playground, a far-reaching chamber ensemble based on the DU campus that bends many genres of modern music. He launched the group with friends and colleagues four years ago. In its new concert season beginning next month, it will play more than 30 dates.
These days, Kehn is grounded in family — he and his wife of nine years, Gina, have two daughters — and in academia. But reminders of his past as MacroCephalic Boy (his solo performance alter-ego) and as a budding rock star in aggressive Denver bands like Skull Flux and Kallisti (“angry young man music,” he says) are still on view. He sports double silver piercings in his left earlobe and tattoos on one wrist. He so cherishes his shotgun and his 9-millimeter pistol that he worked them into an open-ended musical score he calls Gunshot, complete with a bullet hole and simulated bloodstains. In a low-budget horror movie concocted by friends, he will soon make his acting debut as a plump yellow banana bent on mass murder.
By most accounts, Conrad Kehn is also the only male Lamont faculty member whose toenails are painted midnight blue.
His quirks and reinventions of self march on, but one thing never changes: For him, music is a spiritual quest.
“I started my training as a singer,” Kehn says, “and for me singing is an act of prayer. If I need to change the way I feel, I sing. In fact, I sometimes say to my students: If you don’t find God when playing your instrument, you may be doing it wrong.”
Kehn sensed he was doing something wrong back in his mid-undergraduate period, when he was a voice major and singing in the rock bands. Then he heard the Kronos Quartet play the string quartets of the contemporary Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. In Gorecki’s heady mix of liberation politics, mysticism and atonality, Kehn found part of himself, part of the artist he wanted to become.
“I changed my major to composition,” he says, “and that changed everything.”
Neither riches nor much acclaim have come his way since, despite the fact that he’s “a shameless self promoter.” It would be nice to raise $2,000 to $5,000 so that The Playground could make a proper recording, because even in in the age of downloads, Kehn says, “a CD is still your best calling card.” He lives in a small south Denver house, where a battered upright piano and his computer equipment sit hard by a dining room table littered with Barbie dolls, the stuff of daughters Brianna, 7, and Eris, 4, whom the Kehns named for the ancient Greek goddess of chaos.
The old urge for renewal continues. Instead of aiming for a doctorate in music, Kehn combines his composing and performance lives with studies for a master’s degree from DU’s Daniels School of Business. “I’d like to be a dean or an arts administrator,” he says, with a special emphasis at encouraging experimentation in the arts.
“If classical music is dying,” he writes in one of his pointed artistic manifestos, “let’s help kill it . . . because what comes afterward could be amazing.”
Conrad Kehn and MacroCephalic Boy both hope the world will be listening.
Listen to Kehn’s music on his MySpace page.
conrad kehn, music, university of denver
