George Frederick McKay (1899-1970) Chamber Music

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.

&#