Mckay: Suite For Viola And Piano / My Tahoe Window / An April Suite

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Cat No: 8559143

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Release Date: 01 August 2003

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943914328

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MCKAY

Description
George Frederick McKay (1899-1970) Chamber MusicKnown 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. After a whimsical opening, the first movement of the Caricature Dance Suite, Snickertyskip, features the "rag-like" cakewalk rhythm early in the movement, clearly demonstrating its overall ternary form, with the middle section characterized by a lovely melody that returns to the cakewalk. Both the second and third movements, Jabbertyflip and Swaggerhop are relatively short. The final movement, Burlesque March, is a rhythmically and melodically delightful composition that was also published successfully in a version for band. The suite demonstrates immediately how McKay began to develop his own, clearly American voice, with wonderful jazzy rhythms and a rare gift for melody possessed and cultivated by far too few of his peers. After his retirement from the University of Washington, McKay spent a great deal of time at Lake Tahoe. The seven movements that comprise the suite From My Tahoe Window - Summer Moods and Patterns (1965) are all relatively short miniatures reflecting his feelings about nature in general and his own response to the changing seasons of his own life. Sunrise is an evocative, dream-like piece, reminding one at times of a Bill Evans piano solo. It is followed by A Morning Mood, a short, whimsical piece. In the beginning the music of Looking Upward ascends and then relaxes i
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