Chanticleer
The GRAMMY® Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer has been hailed as “the world’s reigning male chorus” by The New Yorker, and is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling over one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the world.
Chanticleer’s repertoire is rooted in the renaissance, and has continued to expand to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz, popular music, and a deep commitment to the commissioning of new compositions and arrangements. The ensemble has committed much of its vast recording catalogue to these commissions, garnering GRAMMY® Awards for its recording of Sir John Tavener’s “Lamentations & Praises”, and the ambitious collection of commissioned works entitled “Colors of Love”. Chanticleer is the recipient of the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming, and its Music Director Emeritus Joseph H. Jennings received the Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African-American choral tradition during his tenure with Chanticleer.
Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer continues to maintain ambitious programming in its hometown of San Francisco, including a large education and outreach program that recently reached over 8,000 people, and an annual concert series that includes its legendary holiday tradition “A Chanticleer Christmas”.
Chanticleer—a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation—is the current recipient of major grants from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Dunard Fund/USA, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Bob Ross Foundation, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Chanticleer’s activities as a not-for-profit corporation are supported by its administrative staff and Board of Trustees.
Check out biographies for the Chanticleer members
Tim Keeler, Music Director
TIM KEELER, Music Director, sang as a countertenor in Chanticleer in the 2017-18 season. In Chanticleer’s history he will be the fourth of its six Music Directors to have been a member of the ensemble. Prior to moving to San Francisco, Tim forged a career as an active conductor, singer, and educator. He performed with New York Polyphony, The Clarion Choir, and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. He also performed frequently as a soloist, appearing regularly in the Bach Vespers series at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York City, as well as with TENET, New York's preeminent early music ensemble. An avid proponent of new and challenging repertoire, Tim remains a core member of Ekmeles, a vocal ensemble based in New York City and dedicated to contemporary, avant-garde, and infrequently-performed vocal repertoire.
While transitioning to his role as music director of Chanticleer, Tim is in the midst of completing his DMA in Choral Conducting at the University of Maryland where he studies with Dr. Edward Maclary. As an educator, Tim directed the Men’s Chorus at the University of Maryland, served as director of choirs at the Special Music School High School in Manhattan, and worked closely with the Young People's Chorus of New York City as a vocal coach and satellite school conductor. He was also the choral conductor for Juilliard's new Summer Performing Arts program - a two-week intensive summer course in Geneva, Switzerland.
Tim holds a BA in Music from Princeton University with certificates in Vocal Performance and Computer Science, an MPhil in Music and Science from Cambridge University, and an MM in Choral Conducting from the University of Michigan. While studying with Dr. Jerry Blackstone at the University of Michigan, Tim served as assistant conductor of the Grammy award-winning UMS Choral Union, preparing the choir for performances with Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. His dissertation at Cambridge explored statistical methods used in natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning as applied to musical phrase detection and segmentation.
Philip Wilder, President and General Director
PHILIP WILDER, President and General Director, returns to Chanticleer with a career spanning 30 years as an artistic programmer, educator, fundraiser, musician, promoter, and recording and film producer. A graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Eastman School of Music and the DeVos Institute for Arts Management, Mr. Wilder began his professional career as a countertenor in Chanticleer in 1990. He also served as Chanticleer’s Assistant Music Director and Founding Director of Education.
After leaving Chanticleer in 2003, Wilder served as Associate Director of the capital campaign for the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and was awarded a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' DeVos Institute for Arts Management. In 2005, Wilder joined 21C Media Group, the New York-based independent public relations, marketing, and consulting firm specializing in classical music and the performing arts.
During his tenure at 21C Media Group, Mr. Wilder developed an impressive roster of clients, including Grammy Award-winners Yefim Bronfman, Susan Graham, and Joyce DiDonato; Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky; and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Jeremy Denk. He also advised organizations, including the Dallas Opera, the Grand Teton Music Festival and Google’s YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In 2009, founder Albert Imperato named Wilder vice president of 21C Media Group.
Mr. Wilder recently served as executive director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO), leading the organization’s strategic planning and day-to-day business. Wilder also worked closely with NCCO’s music directors Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Daniel Hope to guide the orchestra’s ambitious artistic programming, including its acclaimed Featured Composer Program, which commissioned major string orchestra works from some of today’s most prominent composers, including Derek Bermel, William Bolcom, Philip Glass, and Jennifer Higdon.
Wilder is a passionate advocate for classical music and music education, and has teamed up with documentary filmmaker Owsley Brown III on film projects that share stories of the profound impact of music on people and their communities. He served as series producer of the PBS web series Music Makes a City Now, and music consultant for the documentary film Serenade for Haiti, which received its world premiere at HBO’s Doc NYC Festival in November of 2016.
Jenny Bent, Workshop Manager
Dr. Jenny Bent is Professor of Music, Director of Choral Activities, and Associate Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University, where she directs SonoVoce, the Symphonic Chorus, and Concert Choir and teaches Musicianship, Choral Conducting, and Choral Methods and Repertoire. Dr. Bent is also Choral Director of the Santa Rosa Symphony and manages Chanticleer’s summer program, Chanticleer in Sonoma. She is a graduate of Boston University (BM in Voice Performance, MM in Choral Conducting, MM in Voice Performance) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (DMA in Choral Conducting and Choral Literature). Her teachers include Ann Howard Jones, Fred Stoltzfus, Susan Ormont, and Jerold Siena.
Dr. Bent’s choirs have earned unanimous superior ratings and command performances at numerous festivals and have performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Concert reviews by the San Francisco Classical Voice include the following:
- “the choir – Sonoma State University Symphonic Chorus- was superb. Located within the orchestra instead of in the choir loft, the choristers were fully integrated into the sonic texture, aided in no small part by their excellent diction and well-controlled dynamics.”
- “In the “Agnus Dei,” the choir showed off its precise articulation, enunciating “qui tollis peccata mundi” with clarion fervor.”
- “They [SSU Symphonic Chorus] soared above the mighty orchestral forces assembled below and stole the show.”
Recipient of the 2019 CMEA Bay Section Outstanding Choral Educator Award, Dr. Bent has ten years’ experience as a high school choral music educator, most recently at the Marin School of the Arts. She was also on the voice faculty of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, which is part of the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer home of the Boston Symphony.
Dr. Bent is an adjudicator, guest conductor, clinician, and conference presenter for such organizations as the California Music Educators Association, the American Choral Directors Association, and Golden State. She served on the CMEA board, and she is currently Treasurer of the California Choral Directors Association. From 2007-2014, Dr. Bent could be heard hosting the radio show The Choir Loft on KRCB-FM, the Sonoma County NPR affiliate.