Ann McKinley is now well-launched into her fifth career as a musician. After earning her B.M. and M.M. degrees at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she began her piano teaching career in a private conservatory in Grand Island, Nebraska, followed later by four years in Ypsilanti in the Music Department at Eastern Michigan University (where, among other things, she played Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the university orchestra and coached two students in concerto movements which they played with the orchestra).

Then (and this was before and during her stint at EMU), she earned her Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Michigan (where earlier she had been for three years a Teaching Fellow in Keyboard Harmony); her dissertation topic—the sacred music of the Italian Renaissance composer Francesco Corteccia.

Next, for five years she was a Sister in the Benedictine Convent of the Sacred Heart in Lisle where she wrote music for the Mass in the then-new English Liturgy and pieced together a teaching career at Sacred Heart Academy, St. Procopius College, and George Williams College (Downers Grove).

Lastly, at North Central College (starting in 1968) she taught Piano, Theory, Music History, American Music, Opera, music of other cultures, and also the medieval segment in the History of Ideas sequence—during which time she also became active as a performer and composer in the world of the American Recorder Society and wrote piano pieces (3 published by Schaum).

Like many academics she has had valuable experiences in Europe: a summer (1951) in Fontainebleau, France studying at the Conservatoire américain; another summer (1970), doing what can only be called "grunt work" in Vienna at the Albertina for Universal Editions, comparing early editions of Beethoven sonatas. (Universal was contemplating funding a new edition, but this never came to pass, too costly). She spent part of a spring in Paris, tracking down information on Debussy and on the two Paris Expositions (1889 and 1900), these topics related to a couple of her then-enthusiasms: Debussy and the Golliwog doll (and by extension, American minstrelsy) and music at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, summer, 1893. (There is a fit between all of these topics!). She has also worked long and happily on Dvorak who spent the summer of 1893 in Iowa--again, another link. There have been other, shorter, trips to Europe: thrice to Italy, thrice to Prague, twice to Budapest, twice to Russia (her heart lies in Eastern Europe), twice to Belgium to indulge her love of things Burgundian/Franco-Flemish—and going from there over the border to Bonn and Cologne, only lately to East Germany (Bach territory).

Finally, at long last, in retirement (since 1994), she can pull all of her musical selves together in her long-postponed career as a composer.