Following high school, McLoskey studied abroad as a student at Holte Gymnasium outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he learned to speak Danish.
Initially planning on majoring in piano performance, McLoskey was taken aback when he heard, in the same week, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and "Non al suo amante" by the trecento Italian composer Jacopo da Bologna.
“Early music performance was one of the most important things in my life from undergraduate through my doctoral studies and beyond, and it started at UC Santa Barbara,” said McLoskey.
After completing his master's, McLoskey worked for four years at a home automation and systems integration company in Santa Monica called Sound Solutions.
In 1993 he was an American-Scandinvavian Foundation Fellow at Det Kongelige Danske Musikkonservatorium (the Royal Danish Academy of Music), where he studied composition with Ib Nørholm, and contemporary & Renaissance choral techniques with composer/conductor Bo Holten and Ars Nova Copenhagen.
Still, McLoskey remained busy with a variety of projects, including writing his dissertation; giving private lessons; teaching at Harvard, Wellesley, and Longy; holding two church jobs as a singer and organist; and running a skateboard company called Latter-Day Skates for eight years.
After completing his Ph.D., McLoskey taught for three years as a Lecturer at Harvard, and had Visiting Professor appointments at Wellesley College and Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA.
McLoskey joined the faculty of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in 2005, where he is currently a Full Professor of Composition and Theory.
While at Frost, he formed, conducted, and sang with The Other Voices, a vocal ensemble performing medieval, Renaissance, and 20th/21st century repertoire.
He has been commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Barlow Endowment, The Fromm Foundation, Aaron Copland House, Meet The Composer, ASCAP & SCI (the Society of Composers, Inc.), the MATA Festival, The Crossing, King's Chapel (Boston), New Spectrum Foundation for Miranda Cuckson, Guerilla Opera, the International Joint Wind Quintet Project, Network for New Music (Philadelphia), The Alba Music Festival (Italy), the soundSCAPE Festival (Italy), Passepartout Duo (Berlin), Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, Calyx Trio, ensemberlino vocale, Kammerkoret NOVA (Oslo, Norway), Splinter Reeds, [Switch~ Ensemble], Liber, Dinosaur Annex Ensemble, the newEar Ensemble (Kansas City), TAWA Sax Quartet (Lima, Peru), The Calcutta Chamber Orchestra, internationally award-winning violinists Miclen Laipang and Linda Wang, oboist ToniMarie Marchioni, violist Leticia Oaks-Strong of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and many others.
He has also served on the Board of Advisors of The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Center for LDS Arts, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
His Suite hypnagogique was premiered by pianist Scott Holden at Carnegie Hall on June 29, 2018 as part of the Mormon Arts Center Festival.
When McLoskey picked the work’s texts by Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka in 2012, he did not conceive how timely their message of tolerance would become half a decade later.
Among McLoskey’s chamber music, the 1999 duo for viola and piano, Wild Bells, stands out both for its emotional impact and its technical composition.
The three movement work sets texts by and about gay Mormons, and was premiered by Stare At The Sun (Chicago) in March of 2022, following a two year delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of McLoskey's works deal with social justice, politics, and human rights, including Agitprop, Resist, post/resist, Zealot Canticles, You Have a Name and a Place, and The Task Ahead Is Enormous, and There Is Not Much Time.
for soprano & orchestra, and the winner of three awards including the Omaha Symphony Orchestra International New Music Competition and the 5th Annual Boston Chamber Ensemble International Composition Contest, setting excepts of Petrarch's "Septem psalmi penitentialis” and “Canzoniere”; and […]Qumran Psa[lms…], a choral cycle for triple choir, setting fragments of lost psalms from the Dead Sea Scrolls, commissioned by ensemberlino vocale and awarded the 2016 American Prize for Choral Composition.
Solo or "featured" CDs Works on compilation discs McLoskey published a book titled Twentieth Century Danish Music which serves as a research guide on the topic.