The first movement of George Frederick McKay’s “From A Moonlit Ceremony” was premiered by Leopold Stokowski in the Hollywood Bowl in 1946. McKay had been approached to write film music when he was teaching as a visiting professor at USC starting in 1939 while following in the footsteps of Schoenberg and Howard Hanson there. He declined this opportunity for his lifetime post at the University of Washington, Seattle. Two of his students have been active in creating movie music: Earl Robinson and William Bolcom (Illuminata). Robinson actually won a special Academy Award, and has had his music performed by Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, and the Three Dog Night. Another McKay student, Goddard Lieberson rose to be president of Columbia Records, instituted the long-play record and was the original record producer for South Pacific and Westside Story, while using these financial successes to record a great number of Leonard Bernstein’s classical discs for Columbia.

The Hollywood conductor Carmen Dragon used many of McKay’s American folkloric pieces for Standard Oil Radio broadcasts with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Symphony in the period 1948-1966.

McKay’s closest friend in the Los Angeles area was the famed African-American composer William Grant Still, who wrote music for the long-running “Gunsmoke” show on TV. McKay and Still shared a common philosophy concerning the use of inspirational folk themes in concert music.

Well, it took a Russian to define the sound of the American West in the movies for *decades*. I guess the Russians, with their nearly genetic disposition towards melancholy and patriotism, simply relate very well to similar sentiments, even if from another continent altogether.