William Thomas McKinley

Many of these works have been recorded by such ensembles as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the Seattle Symphony. McKinley was the recipient of numerous honors, including an award and citation from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and eight National Endowment for the Arts grants. He is also among the founders of the label MMC Recordings. His son Elliott Miles McKinley is also a composer.

William Thomas McKinley studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology and Yale University. The field of work recorded is jazz, symphonic music and chamber music. Employment is recorded with New England Conservatory. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Arts and Letters Award in Music.

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. His father, Daniel, was a salesman and amateur vaudeville performer, while his mother Ellen was a dancer and piano accompanist. 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. At age three, he showed a talent for emulating the rhythmic patterns of big band drummers heard on the radio. By age five, he was taking piano lessons with a local teacher named Adelaide Weiss, displaying an innate ability to sight-read and improvise in excess of the standard repertoire the lessons provided. By his eleventh birthday, McKinley was already playing piano with dance bands and accompanying at a dance studio four days a week. He would soon become the youngest member of the American Federation of Musicians in Pittsburgh, making enough money to earn a substantial side income while still attending school. 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. Through their intermittent lessons, Costa became McKinley's first musical mentor. He introduced McKinley to other local musicians and recommended him for work in Pittsburgh, advised him on how to navigate the difficult life of the gigging musician, emphasized the value of a broad musical education, and planted the first seeds in McKinley's mind that composition might be his preferred career route. Costa's presence ensured that McKinley spent his high school years devoted to music, singing in the choir during the day, studying recordings and scores after school, and playing professionally on nights and weekends.

McKinley followed in the footsteps of Costa and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in the fall of 1956. As a teenager, he had soured on making his career in what he saw as a creatively-uninspiring dance band scene, and desired to study composition instead. 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. A quirk in the structure of Carnegie Tech's music program meant that McKinley had to wait for two years before beginning his studies in composition. During this period, he studied concert piano with Leonard Eisner and continued to perform six days a week in jazz clubs and as an accompanist on campus. McKinley was finally able to take up with Lopatnikoff for his formal composition studies in the fall of 1958. The expatriate Russian was an acolyte of the neoclassical style made famous by Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky, and through his tutelage McKinley gained more technical grounding in orchestration, instrumentation, and style. His major college works (String Quartet No. 1, Adagio for Violin and Piano) reflected this neoclassical grounding, along with a generous helping of the melodic elegance of Aaron Copland. 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. Constant gigging and lack of opportunity slowed McKinley's compositional output in the years after his graduation from Carnegie Tech in 1960. The one work he did complete, his Trio in One Movement, won him the 1963 BMI Composition Prize and gained him admission to the Tanglewood Institute that summer. Tanglewood gave McKinley the opportunity to make professional connections unavailable to him in Pittsburgh. Copland and Iannis Xenakis were among the composition faculty that summer, and fellow students included William Albright, David Del Tredici, and Shulamit Ran. But McKinley made the most profound connection with Gunther Schuller, his assigned mentor at the institute. 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). Success, though, still eluded him as it had after graduating from Carnegie Tech. At wits end in the spring of 1966, McKinley got in touch with Mel Powell at Yale, whom he'd never met but whose work he was familiar with through recordings. Powell was an ideal person to ask for advice, since he also started as a jazz musician before transitioning into composition. McKinley spoke with Powell and sent samples of his work, which led Powell to extend an invitation to conduct graduate studies in composition. McKinley moved to New Haven and began his program that fall. Powell quickly became the kind of mentor that Lopatnikoff had been years earlier. 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. Powell also encouraged McKinley to further hone his compositional philosophy, in which orchestration is an organic outgrowth of the opening melodic ideas. His influence was so profound that McKinley would write a 1988 article praising the pedagogical methods of his former teacher. During his three years at Yale, McKinley also managed to make connections with musicians that would become erstwhile patrons in the coming years. Foremost among these were saxophonist Les Timmig, who gave McKinley some of his earliest post-graduate commissions in the early 1970s after taking a position in Wisconsin, and clarinetist Richard Stolzman, who tapped McKinley for dozens of works over a period of twenty years.

McKinley secured his first paying performance opportunity with the Audrey Ann Dance Dancing Studio in New Kensington, where he played after school at the age of nine or ten. 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. 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. This was in addition to more commercial gigs accompanying Neil Sedaka and The Four Freshmen that he took primarily to support his growing family. After returning from Tanglewood, McKinley reached an impasse playing in Pittsburgh's conservative jazz scene. By his own description, McKinley was playing a modern style “with a bigger harmonic spectrum…[and] more on top of the beat” that he reflected would become more widespread during the 1970s. Upon moving to New Haven, he was instantly by his own account the best jazz pianist in town, and spent the next three years playing six nights a week and working with any major jazz figure who happened to need a pianist while in New Haven. He continued to play on the side to supplement his day job as a professor. During his three years in Chicago, McKinley performed often at the Jazz Showcase, a venerated club that first opened in 1947. At that locale, McKinley crossed paths with figures like Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, and Art Farmer, though he admitted performing there was motivated more by money than artistry. 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. McKinley saw Lee perform at the Orson Welles Theater in Cambridge in a group featuring members of Gary Burton’s band, and was struck to hear them playing in a style similar to that which he’d wanted to play since the late-1950s. The band would play in Boston two to three nights a week during McKinley’s early years at NEC. While his primary focus was on cutting recordings of his chamber works, McKinley did find time to produce some recordings of his piano work. He produced Improv Quartet Live (1975) with Timmig, a frequent patron of McKinley’s chamber works during the 1970s. 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). Life Cycle (1981) was released on Schuller’s GM Label, featuring drummer Billy Hart, bassist Ed Schuller, saxophonist Joe Lovano, trumpeter Tom Harrell, and trombonist Gary Valente.

McKinley met Marlene Midler while playing at a club in Pittsburgh in 1955, although they were already passing acquaintances from the school choir. They married on April 11, 1956. Marlene would later finish a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and teach in the English department of Suffolk University for over forty years. Together they had five sons: Joseph Thomas (1957–2022), Derek Scott (b. 1961), Jory Damon (1962–2019), Gregory Sëan (b. 1965), and Elliott Miles (b. 1969) who notably became a composer, and currently serves as assistant professor of Music Composition, Theory, and Technology at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI.

See also The William Thomas McKinley Foundation Life and Works Timeline • Chamber and Solo Works Piano Trio No. 1 (1963) Directions (1965) Attitudes (1967) For One (1971) Eleven Interludes for Piano (1971) Fantasies and Inventions for Harpsichord (1972) Etudes No. 1 and 2 for Solo Harp (1973 / 1974) From Opera No. 2 (1976) Tashi Six Impromptus (1978) Blues Lament for Clarinet and Piano (1981) Trio Appassionato (1982) Duo Concerto for Flute and Piano (1983) August Symphony (1983) March Symphony (1984) Three Romances for Flute and Piano (1984) Suite No. 1 for Violoncello (1984) Three Romances for Flute and Piano (1984) Concert Music for Brass Quintet (1985) Sonata for Viola and Piano (1985) Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1986) Preludes for Piano Book I (1988) Piano Quartet (1988) Piano Trio No. 2 (1992) Twenty-Four Etudes (and Postlude) for Solo Piano (2006) Piano Sonata (2010) Preludes for Piano Book II (2011) Piano Trio No. 3 (2014) • Concerti Triple Concerto for Jazz Trio and Orchestra (1970) Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra (1974) Concerto No. 1 for Clarinet and Orchestra (1977) Concerto No. 1 for Viola and Orchestra (1978) Concerto No. 1 for Cello and Orchestra (1978) Concerto No. 2 for Viola and Orchestra (1985) Sinfonie Concertante (1985) Double Concerto (1985) Golden Pedals Concerto for Flute and String Orchestra (1986) Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra (1987) O’Leary Concerto No. 2 for Clarinet and Orchestra (1990) Silent Whispers (1992) for Piano and Orchestra Concerto No. 3 for Viola and Orchestra (1993) Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (1994) Concerto No. 3 for Clarinet and Orchestra (1994) Concerto No. 1 for Violin, Viola and Orchestra (1994) Concert Variations Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1995) Seasons “Crazy Rags” for String Quartet and Orchestra (1997) Tango, Intermezzo, and Dance for Violin and Orchestra (1999) Six Movements for Clarinet and Orchestra (2000) • Orchestral Works Concerto for Orchestra No. 1 (1974) Concertino for Grand Orchestra (1976) Symphony No. 1 in one movement (1977) Symphony No. 2 (1978) The Mountain (1982) Symphony No. 3 (1984) Romantic Symphony No. 4 (1985) Boston Overture (1986) Symphony No. 5 (1989) Irish New York Overture (1989) Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 (1993) Lightning (1994) Flyin’ Home (1997) Symphony No. 6 (1998) Prague Meteor (2006) Comet (2006) Elegy for Strings (2006) Symphony No. 7 (2006) Symphony No. 8 (2009) Universe • Choral & Vocal Works Six Pieces for Soprano and Piano (1972) Five Songs (1973) Eliot for Mixed Chorus (1976) Four Text Settings (1979) for SATB chorus Deliverance, Amen (1983) an oratorio New York Memories (1987) Totentanz (1992) Mauern (1992) Dallas, 1963 for Baritone and Orchestra (1993) Missa Futura (2000) In the Beginning (2008) Sir Orfeo (2009) Four Late Songs (2011) Ten Medieval Songs (2014) • String Quartets String Quartet No. 1 (1959) String Quartet No. 2 (1973) “Galaxy” String Quartet No. 3 (1976) String Quartet No. 4 (1976) “Fantasia Concertante” String Quartet No. 5 (1977) “Six Movements” String Quartet No. 6 (1986) String Quartet No. 7 (1988) String Quartet No. 8 (1992) String Quartet No. 9 (1994) • Large Chamber Works and “Paintings” Series From Opera (1968) Quadruplum (1970) Paintings No. 1 (1972) Paintings No. 2 (1975) Paintings No. 3 (1976) Paintings No. 4 (1978) magical visions Paintings No. 5 (1979) Paintings No. 6 (1981) to hear the light dancing Paintings No. 7 (1982) Poem of Light (1983) Paintings No. 8 (1988) Chamber Concerto No. 3 (1991)

William Thomas McKinley is recorded with the occupation university teacher. Recorded with the occupation jazz musician. Recorded as having received Guggenheim Fellowship and Arts and Letters Award in Music. Within the Encyclopedia. Connected to 1 other published record in the VALÉORINE Encyclopedia.