McKinley, William Thomas

William Thomas McKinley was a prolific composer, inspiring teacher, and gregarious raconteur whose career reflected a quintessentially American sort of musical eclecticism. Born in New Kensington, PA on December 9, 1938, he showed great musical facility from an early age, improvising at the piano by age five and playing professionally in nearby Pittsburgh from age eleven, blossoming under the tutelage of famed local pianist Johnny Costa. Active as a performer in Pittsburgh starting in his teens, the young McKinley worked with jazz luminaries such as Dexter Gordon, Wes Montgomery, and pop acts such as Neil Sedaka and Aretha Franklin. For college, however, he chose the route of composition. McKinley attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon) and studied with Nikolai Lopatnikoff, opening the door for a summer at the Tanglewood Institute and winning the BMI Prize in Composition in 1963. He later entered the graduate program at Yale to study with Mel Powell, where his interest in jazz fused with his classical studies in composition, coalescing into his first mature style. Upon leaving Yale, he taught for three years at the University of Chicago before moving on to the New England Conservatory in 1973. Splitting time between the composition and jazz departments, McKinley spent the next twenty years imbuing the importance of individual expression within a generation of young musicians. During this period, his music developed the more tonal grounding of his second mature period, anchored with professional success and accolades in in the form of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous commissions including but not limited to the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Seattle Symphony, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Concurrently, his career as a jazz pianist found him working with a litany of major jazz artists including Roy Haynes, Miroslav Vitous, and Eddie Gomez, and writing crossover works for Gary Burton and Stan Getz. Following his retirement from teaching in 1994, McKinley produced recordings for the independent label Master Musicians Collective (MMC), continued writing for commissions, and would occasionally perform publicly at the piano. At the time of his death on January 3, 2015, he had over three hundred published works to his name and was generally regarded as an unflinching champion of the potential for jazz and music of the African diaspora to have a place within the milieu of classical art music.