William Thomas McKinley (December 9, 1938 – February 3, 2015) was an American composer and jazz pianist born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. He wrote more than 300 musical compositions in what he called a neo-tonal style, of which Margalit Fox writes, for The New York Times, "were known for their lyricism, rhythmic propulsion and accessibility" and adds that his music "could recall not only jazz and blues but also Bach, Debussy, Ravel and Vaughan Williams.". 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.Biography of William Thomas McKinley at www.schirmer.com He is also among the founders of the label MMC Recordings.
His son Elliott Miles McKinley is also a composer.
Early life 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.Sposato, pages 2-3. 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.
Education 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.Sposato, page 4. 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.Sposato, page 5.
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.Harry J. Kraut and Thomas D. Perry Jr., “Report on the Twenty-First Session, June 30-August 25, 1963,” The Berkshire Music Center, Tanglwood-Lenox, Massachusetts. 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).Sposato, page 8. 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.Sposato, page 10. 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.William Thomas McKinley, “Mel Powell’s Pedagogy,” Aperiodical: New Music at CalArts 2 (1988), 47.
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.
Teaching
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. Among his students were saxophonists Eric Kloss and Steve Grossman.Sposato, page 6. McKinley secured his first official teaching post while still enrolled at Yale, spending one semester at SUNY-Albany in the spring of 1968.Sposato, page 11. After graduating in 1969, he accepted a position as an assistant professor of composition at the University of Chicago. He joined a department anchored by Easley Blackwood and Ralph Shapey, and featuring Shapey's Contemporary Chamber Players as a resident ensemble to workshop and perform new music. 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 three years, though, he grew weary of the music department's lack of support for his interest in jazz and his intuition-based style of composition. 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. He accepted and began teaching at the institution in the fall of 1973.
At NEC, McKinley was finally encouraged to pursue his lifelong interest in creating music ensconced in both the jazz and classical worlds. Schuller had built the program to utilize the specific cross-genre talents of composers like McKinley, George Russell, and Jaki Byard. Although he was hired into the composition department, McKinley took an active role in the development of the Jazz Studies program from the start. 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.Susan Calkins. 2012. “A History of Jazz Studies at the New England Conservatory, 1969-2009: The Legacy of Gunther Schuller.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 129. Con Chapman, a former student at NEC, wrote that McKinley often told students that only two emotions were worthy of expression in jazz performance: rage and introspection.Con Chapman, Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 173. In 1978, McKinley became chair of the rebranded Department of Afro-American Studies. By his own admission, this period as an administrator was less than pleasant, but he still accomplished a great deal. Among other things, he added Miroslav Vitouš and Bobby Moses to the department, and helped to restructure part of the curriculum by adding a course in standard repertoire.Calkins, page 175. Because running the department interfered with his growing body of commissions, he stepped down in 1981, and after returning temporarily for a year left administration for good in 1983. McKinley stayed on at NEC to teach in both the composition and jazz studies departments until his retirement in 1992, and afterward continued to teach piano and composition privately until his death.
Performing career