MCKAY, GEORGE FREDERICK (1899 - 1970)
Known as the Dean of Northwest Composers, George
Frederick McKay composed and arranged a wide
variety of works, ranging from orchestral
compositions and music for ballet to band marches,
over the course of forty years as a professor at the
University of Washington. He began serious...
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Known as the Dean of Northwest Composers, George
Frederick McKay composed and arranged a wide
variety of works, ranging from orchestral
compositions and music for ballet to band marches,
over the course of forty years as a professor at the
University of Washington. He began serious study of
music there in 1919, studying composition with Carl
Paige Wood. After two years in Seattle, he received a
scholarship to study composition at the Eastman
School of Music in Rochester, New York, under the
directorship of Howard Hanson, where McKay’s
teachers were Christian Sinding and Selim Palmgren.
McKay was the first graduate in composition from
Eastman. Mckay composed at the piano, writing short
musical notations in pencil, later to be organized in
ink at a large writing-desk. Although his performance
instrument was the violin, the piano compositions
here included exemplify his ability to write
idiomatically for the piano.
Popular American music in the 1920s was
characterized not only by the increasing popularity
of New Orleans jazz, but also of African-American
and Klezmer-influenced music brought to the
American stage. Shows such as Shuffle Along (1921)
by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle as well as the
Ziegfeld Follies were transforming American
popular song. McKay’s familiarity with and
affection for American rhythms and melodies is
demonstrated clearly in The Caricature Dance Suite
(1924). He had begun work on this composition
during his time in Seattle, and later at Eastman, and
it became his first published work, issued by Schotts
in Germany. The full suite also exists as an
arrangement for orchestra and in many ways summarises an important
element in all of McKay’s music; his ability to write
engaging music that is firmly rooted in the art music
tradition of the time.
Michael Coolen