[4] His mother remarried to biochemist Daniel E. Koshland Jr. in 2000, of the Haas family, the owners of Levi Strauss & Co.[citation needed] Keene studied the piano and cello in his youth.

[1][7] At the University of California, Berkeley he earned a degree in history instead of music; reasoning that he didn't want to waste his time re-learning skills and content he had already mastered.

He was to conduct a great array of operas at that theatre, including the world premiere of Menotti's The Most Important Man (with Harry Theyard, 1971),[8] as well as La traviata, Le nozze di Figaro (with Michael Devlin in the title role), The Makropoulos Case, Susannah, Tosca (with Marisa Galvany), Beatrix Cenci, Faust, Die Zauberflöte (with Syble Young as the Queen of the Night), L'incoronazione di Poppea, Ariadne auf Naxos, Médée (in the Italian version), I puritani (with Beverly Sills), Salome, A Village Romeo and Juliet, La fanciulla del West, Andrea Chénier, L'amour des trois oranges, The Turn of the Screw (with Phyllis Treigle as Miss Jessel), Jay Reise's Rasputin, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, and Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk.

[7] He was seen over PBS conducting The Consul (1977) and Vanessa (1978) from Spoleto USA, and Frank Corsaro's City Opera productions of Madama Butterfly (1982) and Carmen (1984).

Keene's discography includes the first recording of Philip Glass' Satyagraha (for CBS/Sony, 1984), and John Corigliano's score to Ken Russell's film, Altered States (on RCA, 1980).