Welcome to the official web site of Grammy and multiple Emmy Award winning composer Brian Keane.
Multiple Emmy award winning composer, Grammy award winning producer, and noted guitarist Brian Keane has scored literally hundreds of films and television shows, and produced over 150 albums, mostly from his studio in the woods of Connecticut. His music has been hailed critically as "indelible and breathtaking" by the Los Angeles Times, "piercingly beautiful" by The New York Times and "masterful" by Newsweek, and he has been called a "musician's musician" by Downbeat, a "composer's composer" by The Hollywood Reporter, and “one of the most impressive musicians of the decade” by the editor of Billboard magazine.
Among Brian’s many enduring credits are “New York” the epic, multiple Emmy winning Burns documentary series that is among the biggest selling documentaries of all time, “Long Journey Home” which won a Grammy for its soundtrack in collaboration with The Chieftains, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Sinead O’Connor, and others, the classic “Winter’s Solstice” record series for Windham Hill which he produced, and his ground breaking ethnic recordings with middle eastern musician Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Irish musician Joanie Madden, and many others.
Brian spent 2025 producing three symphonies he had written earlier in his career, but was always too busy to produce.
The symphonies are expanded concepts of symphonies. They include a full symphony orchestra, however, they also include instruments from around the world, drums, bass, electric guitars, synthesizers, and various percussion elements.
"A Speck In Time", originally composed by Brian in 1984, just after a world tour in a trio with Larry Coryell and Paco de Lucia, and just after his first documentary score was nominated for an Academy Award. At the time, Brian wondered what it might sound like to have top musicians from around the world all play on a piece of music written to accomodate them, that was a tribute to our fragile and unlikely existence as living beings on planet Earth. The idea was hugely ambitious and impractical at that time. Brian's composing career introduced him to early computer composing software. He entered the symphony using what would be considered primative software by today's standards (called MIDI), and stored on 3 1/4" floppy disks for over 30 years. After a long and prolific career, and just after scoring the 75th anniversary of the American Ballet Theatre, Brian and his engineer Jeff Frez-Albrecht resurrected "A Speck In Time" from the floppy disks to modern digital orchestration tools. Though the instrumentation was adapted to its current form, the composition itself remaind essentially unchanged. After 2020, and digital recording anywhere in the world became normalized, the opportunity to record "A Speck In Time" was finally possible. Brian set aside 2025 to record the project, as well as two other symphonies he had subsequently written: his "Middle Eastern Symphony", written in 1993, and "Edge of Discovery", written in 1997. Additionally, since Brian was going to produce the "Middle Eastern Symphony", and be working with Omar Faruk Tekbilek again, he also agreed to produce another album in their well-known series of collaborations.
Production began on the symphonic projects late in 2024, and continued through 2025. Musicians were recorded around the world: Omar Faruk Tekbilek in Turkey; George Gao in Bejing, China; Irish musicians Joanie Madden and Ivan Goeff; Armeian percussionist Arto Tuncboyacian; Lebanese percussionist and Paul Simon sideman Jamey Haddad; drummers Rodney Holmes, Joel Rosenblatt, and Chris Wabach; and many of the leading orchestra players from Broadway and New York-based symphonies. The recording involved multiple studios, dozens of engineers, and thousands of tracks. Mixing began in October of 2025 and continued for the remainder of the year. Additionally, an immersive experience for "A Speck In Time" is currently in production, and a new recording project for Omar Faruk Tekbilek is ongoing. In addition to that, the Ric Burns epic 16-hour, 8 episode, award-winning "New York" (which, for a long time, was the best-selling documentary series in the history of television), and which Brian originally scored, will be adding two more episodes due to air in the fall of 2026.
Brian's considerable music catalog continues to be leased by major entertainment companies, and there is talk of returning to another project with award-winning director Fritz Mitchell in the coming year.
button below to listen to a Brian Keane music sampler