Program Notes:

Though he made his mark as a composer and jazz pianist during his days studying and residing in Pittsburgh, the music of William Thomas McKinley received only two performances in a city he considered his creative home by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the TASHI quartet, yet through his firm friendship with fellow composer John Harbison, McKinley sent his friend several of his scores to consider for possible performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony, of which Harbison was appointed Composer-in-Residence with the orchestra.

Yet McKinley decided that the orchestra deserved a new piece that would make its indelible mark on both Harbison and the musicians: “I then realized that I had composed for every genre except the large chamber orchestra (or small symphony orchestra), and immediately began work on an orchestral tone poem which I sent to John as a gift”

The gift that McKinley sent to Harbison was a fifteen-minute symphonic poem which the composer described as “...a difficult work, but not in the contemporary sense of difficult or overly complex. Its difficulties are of the Mahlerian, Straussian and Ravelian orchestral type – not insurmountable, but often rugged, bold, florid and virtuostically demanding”.

Unfolding in several distinct sections, McKinley's composition reveals, in the composer's words, “extremely clear thematic ideas and sharp cutting motivic elements”, principally dominated by an ideé fixe that is first pronounced by the flute “against a rich and clearly articulated harmonic background.” It is this theme that is thematically transfigured and tossed around the various choirs of the orchestra alternating between rugged power and spiritual reflection, which McKinley summarizes the work's purpose to strive “toward a singular unity”.

Scored for a medium-sized orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, piano, strings and a sizable percussion section including timpani, The Mountain received its first performance on the second concert of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's “Here and Now' series under the direction of associate conductor Michael Lankester at Morris Kaufman Auditorium on1 17 October 1982.

– Kevin Scott, March 2023