Program Notes

The first string quartet was composed in 1959 when McKinley was only 20 years of age and a student at Carnegie Mellon University (then known as Carnegie Tech). The music spans two tightly constructed and contrasting movements bonded by thematically related material, all treated in a variety of ways, and shows a composer who has absorbed, assimilated, and mastered much of the neoclassicism which would have been presented him under the tutelage of his composition teacher, Nikolai Lopatnikoff (who was a pupil of Sergei Prokofiev). Yet the music also points forward to the composer's own original and unique way of rhythmic development, displaced and irregular phrasing, and fluidity, something likely influence by his experience with jazz as a pianist as well as his love of Brahms.