Michael Campbell is a pianist, author and teacher. He was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Amherst College, where he graduated magna cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, he served in the United States Naval Academy Band, during which time he began study with Leon Fleisher. He was the soloist for Fleisher’s debut as a conductor with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra. He continued his study with Fleisher at Peabody Conservatory, where he earned MM and DMA degrees in piano. His dissertation is a study of the piano sonatas of Roger Sessions. While at Peabody, he was active as a commercial musician, assisting such artists as Angela Lansbury, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Bob Hope, Redd Foxx, Ethel Merman, and Don McLean.
Campbell is the author of two widely used texts for college music courses, Popular Music in America, and Rock and Roll, An Introduction. Both texts were released in new digital editions in 2018.
Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Music at Western Illinois University, where he taught from 1981 through 2003. He has performed widely throughout the United States and Canada. His repertoire covers three centuries of music, including a broad variety of 20th century American music. He performed the complete piano music of Roger Sessions at major universities throughout the United States, as well as his transcriptions of piano solos by Art Tatum and other great jazz pianists and his own arrangements of classic popular songs. His recent programs, entitled The Golden Age of the Piano,are samplings of piano music of all kinds that audiences might have heard between 1890 and 1940.