William Thomas McKinley was born on December 9, 1938 in the industrial town of New Kensington, PA. Like most children of this era, McKinley’s first exposure to music came through the radio, the family’s primary form of entertainment. Despite their own somewhat cursory interest in music, Ellen and Daniel McKinley did not fail to notice their son’s attraction; even before the age of three he would sit listening to the Big Bands, accompanying them with sticks, spoons, or whatever was at hand. They began him on drum lessons, which he continued until age five, after which he switched to piano. Throughout these years, McKinley developed a passion for improvisation, which he would often pursue in lieu of his teacher’s assignments and for up to ten hours a day. By the age of ten, his playing matured to the point that he was able to work at a local dance school as an accompanist; by the age of twelve, he was earning enough through performance to warrant joining the American Federation of Musicians union.
During High School, McKinley began to supplement his own self-taught improvisational skills with formal training from Carolyn Shankovich, his choir director, and from John Costa, Pittsburgh’s premier jazz pianist. During their time together, Costa recommended his pupil for numerous gigs in the Pittsburgh area and even allowed McKinley to substitute for him on occasion.
Inspired by Costa’s own career choices, McKinley attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) to pursue his Bachelor’s degree. His studies there began as a piano major under Leonard Eisner, but, with Eisner’s encouragement, he changed concentrations and began to study composition with Costa’s own teacher, Nikolai Lopatnikoff, during his third year. Lopatnikoff provided McKinley with what his wife Marlene has described as “the quintessential [compositional] foundation in the grand European manner”—instruction which included score reading, harmony, orchestration and what McKinley has called “a sense of historical identity.” Lopatnikoff’s technique was based in the neo-classical tradition of organic musical development, similar to that used by Beethoven, Brahms, and Hindemith, and as such found a strong resonance with McKinley’s improvisation background. The works of this period bear evidence of this: music which is improvised from a spontaneously conceived original idea—the first of McKinley’s many attempts to fuse the classical and jazz traditions.
Shortly after his graduation from Carnegie Tech, McKinley attended Tanglewood for the first time in the summer of 1963, his entrance assisted by the winning of the BMI prize a few months earlier. There he worked extensively with composers Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Gunther Schuller. Tanglewood introduced McKinley to serialism, which he adopted shortly thereafter as his primary compositional language. McKinley’s serialism was not “pure,” however, in that it did not rely on the strict use of pre-formulated tone-rows, but was based, rather, on improvised melodies—thus placing it somewhere between the chaos of atonality and the strict order of twelve-tone. This “improvised serialism,” with its freedom (both rhythmic and melodic) from the confines of traditional classical composition, represented McKinley’s second attempt to combine the jazz and classical traditions.
In 1966, McKinley began a combined Master’s/DMA program at Yale University, where he studied with Mel Powell. Powell was, at the time, very involved with electronic music and the works of Webern and was thus able to nurture McKinley’s atonal leanings. While at Yale, McKinley received his first Fromm commission, which included another summer at Tanglewood as a guest composer and, during his third year, he took a one semester leave of absence to fill an associate professor position at SUNY Albany, where he taught opera history. Yale also provided McKinley with the friendship of performers such as saxophonist Les Thimmig and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, both of whom would become major advocates of his music in the years to come.
McKinley was hired by the University of Chicago immediately after finishing his studies at Yale in 1969. His tenure there witnessed several career milestones, including a commission and performance by the Chicago Symphony of his Triple Concerto and his first recording: piano soloist for Ralph Shapey’s Rituals (recently re-released on CD). In 1973, however, two schools, Swarthmore College and New England Conservatory, began to entice McKinley into joining their faculties. Encouraged by the possibility of working with his former teacher Gunther Schuller and by the performance opportunities available in the city of Boston, McKinley decided to leave the Chicago in favor of the NEC position.
McKinley’s first years at NEC were, compositionally, much like his graduate school and University of Chicago careers, filled with numerous new works, but relatively few performances. (One of his Yale colleagues, Les Thimmig, continued to perform his music frequently at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, however.) In 1975, McKinley re-established contact with another friend from Yale, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, who, with his group Tashi, began to commission and perform new works. This renewed contact was McKinley’s first step towards a more aggressive approach to his career. The effort was quickly rewarded with the first of eight National Endowment grants and his first Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1976, the winning of the Minnesota Orchestra 75th Anniversary Prize (for his Symphony No. 1) and of an award from the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation in 1977, and the first of several commissions by Boston Musica Viva, one of Boston’s premier new music ensembles conducted by Richard Pittman, in 1978. Additionally, the late seventies saw Margun Music’s acceptance of several of his pieces for publication, the release of the first recording of one of his pieces (Paintings No. 2 on Golden Crest Records), his promotion at the Conservatory to temporary head of the jazz department, two summers as a guest composer at Tanglewood, and performances by the John Oliver Chorale, Collage and various other ensembles under the direction Gunther Schuller, and by numerous Conservatory groups.
In 1981, McKinley made what might be seen in retrospect as the most assertive step towards the advance of his career by returning to tonal composition and to a style similar to that of his youth—a change encouraged by Richard Stoltzman’s commission of an arrangement of Gordon Jenkins’ Goodbye, which was premiered at a Benny Goodman tribute at Carnegie Hall with the honoree in attendance, and by the recent popularity of minimalism. In this new “neo-tonal” style, McKinley retains the compositional process of his serial works, in that the works continue to be based on improvisation, but the tonal and minimalistic elements common to both jazz and classical music are, to some degree, retained. The result is music which makes use of extended twentieth-century tonality and occasional minimalistic and atonal colorings, which is melodic, and which has a clear jazz influence throughout.
Positive response to McKinley’s stylistic change was quickly forthcoming; first through Stoltzman, who reported on the positive feedback he received from colleagues and audiences on these first neo-tonal works he had commissioned, and later from the commissions, performances, residences, and awards which began to roll in from other performers and organizations. In addition to a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Naumberg Foundation grant, and the seven additional NEA grants, in the last fifteen years McKinley has received awards from the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation of the Library of Congress, and the League of Composers–ISCM in Boston. He has received commissions from and been performed by, among many others, the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Boston Symphony under John Williams, the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz, the Bella Lewitzky Dance Troupe, the Concert Artists Guild, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble under David Stock, the Los Angeles Chamber and Pasadena Symphony Orchestras under Jorge Mester, the American Symphony under Robert Black, the Jazz Composers Alliance, the Richmond Symphony under George Manahan, the Rheinische Philharmonie under James Lockhart, the Queensland Youth Orchestra (Australia) under John Curro, and, most significantly, by the city of Emsdetten, Germany for the Emsdettener Totentanz (which included performances with members of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Berlin Saxophone Quartet and the Silesian String Quartet under Albert Göken). In addition to Richard Stoltzman and Les Thimmig, many other prominent soloists have become advocates of McKinley’s work over the years, including Gary Burton, Walter Trampler, Sol Greitzer, Deborah Greitzer, Jeff Silberschlag, Colin Carr, Glenn Dicterow, Karen Dreyfus, Bernard Goldberg, and the late Stan Getz. He has also had his works recorded by the Northeastern, Vienna Modern Masters, GM, CRI, Arch, and, most recently, Koch, Delos, and RCA Red Seal labels, as well as by McKinley’s own brainchild, MMC Recordings, all with world-renowned orchestras including the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Berlin and Prague Radio Symphonies, and the Seattle and London Symphony Orchestras.
Nineteen ninety-five was an eventful year for McKinley, beginning in March with Delos’ recording of the Concert Variations with New York Philharmonic concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, Karen Dreyfus, and the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz. Other notable events of that same month included the world and Boston premieres of McKinley’s Ninth String Quartet by the Boston Composers String Quartet at Weill Recital Hall and the Tsai Performance Center, as well as the fourth performance of the Emsdettener Totentanz at the Musiksommer Festival in Quedlinburg, Germany, where McKinley served as the Guest Composer-in-Residence. Late September saw the premiere of McKinley’s Violin Concerto, Seasons of Prague, in Dvorak Hall in the Czech Republic with the Prague Radio Symphony and in November, McKinley’s arrangements of numerous pop songs were performed by the Seattle Symphony as a part of the Cyberian Rhapsody: the first major live orchestral concert to be broadcast on the Internet. Lastly, several McKinley works were featured in a concert by the English Virtuosi at Wigmore Hall in London in December.
Nineteen ninety-six, which promises to equal its predecessor, has already seen the premiere of McKinley’s Crazy Rags at Alice Tully Hall by Concordia and the Sirius String Quartet and the Twentieth-Anniversary concert of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, which featured a revival of McKinley’s Grand Finale No. 1. Still to come are a performance of a new double concerto with Bernard Goldberg and the New Jersey Symphony conducted by Glen Cortese at the International Flute Convention in New York, and the recording this summer of new works for the Warsaw Philharmonic, the London Symphony, and the Seattle Symphony on the MMC Recordings label.
In addition to his career as composer, McKinley continues to teach privately, maintain his career as a jazz pianist, and direct the affairs of the Master Musicians Collective.
—Jeffrey Sposato |
