William Thomas McKinley

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.

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.

He is also among the founders of the label MMC Recordings.

His son Elliott Miles McKinley is also a composer.

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.

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.