William Thomas McKinley
[4] McKinley was born in New Kensington, PA to a working-class Irish-American family distantly related to his namesake twenty-fifth President of the United States.
After divorcing during the war, Ellen married Richard Boucher, a factory worker who provided the home in which McKinley was raised and the income through which his musical talent was cultivated.
[4] This early success brought him to the attention of pianist Johnny Costa (1922–1996), a legend in New Kensington nicknamed the “White Art Tatum” who spent years playing background music for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Despite having no formal compositional training, McKinley impressed resident professor Nikolai Lopatnikoff with a fifteen-minute improvisation in the style of Maurice Ravel during his audition, and was admitted to the school.
Lopatnikoff also instilled the concept that proper composition was best served by improvised elaborations upon melodic ideas, a lesson that McKinley would use in his first attempts to fuse classical and jazz techniques together in his own work.
Copland and Iannis Xenakis were among the composition faculty that summer, and fellow students included William Albright, David Del Tredici, and Shulamit Ran.
While other faculty and students were intent to explore the latest in serial techniques, Schuller encouraged McKinley's instincts to find workable fusions between jazz and classical music.
Upon returning from Tanglewood, he set about reinventing his entire compositional milieu, which included changing workspaces (from piano to drafting table) and styles (from neoclassical to atonal).
His experiments with electronic music influenced by Anton Webern and Milton Babbitt made Powell an ideal figure to help shape McKinley's ongoing incorporation of atonal techniques.
McKinley began taking on theory and composition students during his senior year of college with the blessing of Alexei Haieff, a sabbatical replacement for Lopatnikoff.
While at Chicago, McKinley started his own Contemporary Jazz and Improvisation Ensemble and secured his first major commission from a symphony orchestra, which became the Triple Concerto (1970) for the CSO.
After turning down a job at Swarthmore College that would have provided a similar environment to the one he sought to escape in Chicago, McKinley was offered a position at the New England Conservatory by his old Tanglewood mentor Schuller.
In piano lessons, jazz harmony courses, and ensemble coaching, he emphasized creative development of improvisational voice over commercial skills, and his style of spontaneity in lieu of structure made him popular amongst his students.
[17] While in high school, his mentor Costa recommended him for a number of jobs in Pittsburgh and other cities in the area that helped to establish McKinley as a performer of great skill for his age.
[18] During the course of his college studies, McKinley performed several nights a week at the Midway Lounge in downtown Pittsburgh, where he played with luminaries Sonny Stitt and King Pleasure.
At that locale, McKinley crossed paths with figures like Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, and Art Farmer,[21] though he admitted performing there was motivated more by money than artistry.
[22] Shortly after taking his position at NEC, McKinley played in a group called Departed Feathers in collaboration with Thomas Oboe Lee, a jazz performance major at the school and fellow Pittsburgh native.
A recording of a live set featuring McKinley and Vitouš at Michael’s Pub in Boston on October 8, 1980 was released as the album Earth Cycle (1980).
These early works focus on the development of melodic ideas in the Stravinsky-Hindemith neoclassical tradition, McKinley’s own interest in Copland, and his jazz performance background which brought forth a great deal of rhythmic syncopation.
They taught that the mystical union of mind with spirit is paramount to the creative psyche, and they helped me to see the line of descent from the great masters to the present.
When this heritage was coupled with my purely American jazz spirit, it was clear how my musical instincts would be revealed, and how my “American-ness” would manifest itself from the duality I traversed during these years.
He framed this move as a compromise between his sense of anti-order and intuition-based writing practice and the dominant strain of serialism suffusing American composition departments during that era.
The transformation to tonality was spurred in part from frustrations with reconciling his jazz background and classical study with the rough edges inherent in serial and atonal techniques.
McKinley would credit Philip Glass and Steve Reich for pushing these frustrations to the forefront of his mind, though he took no direct inspiration from minimalist techniques.
His first notable embrace of this transformation came when writing Goodbye (1981), a work commissioned by Stoltzman and based on a song made famous by Benny Goodman, in which the original melody served as a cantus firmus.
Among the most well known were his tone poem The Mountain (1982), an orchestral work of Brahmsian grandeur dedicated to fellow neotonal auteur John Harbison, the oratorio Deliverance, Amen (1983), and his “Romantic” Symphony No.
[33] Produced by Mark Yacavonne for WQED, the program featured music and interviews from McKinley, Daniel Lentz, and David Stock on their mentors, influences, and neo-classical backgrounds.
The modus operandi for MMC, in McKinley's own words, was to “help composers connect with the listening public and vice versa and have built a wonderfully diverse catalog of truly outstanding modern music.
When music entrepreneur Bob Lord came aboard to assist with day-to-day operation of MMC in 2005, he mused at the cognitive dissonance of a company producing recordings of major symphony orchestras while working out of “a century-old dilapidated house with a couple of run-down computers resting on bedroom doors pulled from their frames and laid atop wooden sawhorses, with piles of dust lingering in forgotten fireplaces.”[36] Lord ended up purchasing MMC's entire catalog in 2008 and folded it into his new venture, PARMA Recordings.
The incident contributed to the resignation of BPL President Amy Ryan, under whose watch other high-profile works by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt had gone missing.
