A friend asked me to compose a piece for his 80th birthday. He and his wife have a farm in WV. He asked me to include animal sounds heard there. I put them in order of their likely appearance from dawn to dusk. These are diurnal: wood thrush, field sparrow red belly woodpecker, bobcats. Wippoorwills are nocturnal. In addition to the animals some of the things you will also hear, but not in this order, are a train, rain, storm, wind. Listen carefully to identify other sounds.

Collie's Critters Mixvvvv

Frances Thompson McKay began improvising/playing by ear at age 5.  Living near the James River influenced her music and love of nature.

Program notes for Collie’s critters (electroacoustic piece):
This is a birthday present for a friend who asked me to create a piece that used sounds from the birds and bobcats he has heard near the WV farm of he and his wife. It traces these from dawn to night: wood thrush, field sparrow, red belly woodpecker, bobcats, and in the night the whippoorwills. Listen for (not in this order) a train, rain, a storm, more.
 
About:
McKay, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on film music, has improvised on the piano for silent films at the National Gallery of Art, and the music for the silent masterpiece Fraulein Else, the first silent film shown at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. 

Composition/theory with Robert Hall Lewis, Nadia Boulanger, piano studies with Carl Broman and Marjorie Mitchell. Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. 

Works
Concert of works by the Contemporary Music Forum, Corcoran Gallery, 2002
river time, text by William Styron, commissioned by the Alexandria Choral Society, 2002
Concert of works presented on Strathmore Hall’s American Composer Series, 1994
Mary Baldwin College’s Sesquicentennial commission: SummerVerses: The Book of Ruth, 1992

Critical responses: 
A Critical Mass, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
	It is an incomprehensible but incontrovertible  fact that one seventh of the world’s population lives in a constant state of hunger.  When coupled with the reality that the weaponry stockpiled in countless countries today is 5,000 times greater than  that used in World War II, one is faced with a dilemma  of vast proportions.
	A Critical Mass , composed by Frances Thompson McKay, addresses these issues  in a bold and frightening way. The audience had  no choice but to be affected by the mass. . . gripping in its portrayal of human frailties,  the score fraught with emotional conflict . . . music of quiet desolation. . . stately and chaotic, as if hinting at the incredulity of allowing such events to occur.
					Norman Middleton 2002
				
Take the Wings of the Morning To the Uttermost Parts of the Sea
	A marvelously mobile arioso heavily and intricately scored for solo cello, the scores thins to a lonely, affirmative utterance that transfigures the Latinate dance materials that it comprises. . . McKay’s monody surged  and soared.
					Mark Adamo, The Washington Post

Rites of Passage		
	. . . has moments of great power. . . compelling, richly textured varied theme. . .a broad variety of descriptive, meditative, imaginative and even jazzy styles. . . It left the audience enthusiastic and ready for more.
					Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, 1988 

Elegy in the Form of a Dream
		. . . dropped like a plumb line into the emotional depths of awareness. Manipulated sound and unusual structure marked McKay’s Elegy. Her programmatic composition unwound like a perpetual slow-motion machine, an aural “This is your life” with the requisite memories and pain.
					J. Kenneth Townsend, The Washington Post, 1978

soul  shattering                                    Dana Franchitto, The Cape Codder, 1984
				
expressionistic fantasy music, filled with strange rappings, thrumming inside the piano, all manner of unexpected sounds designed to stimulate the imagination of the listener
					Dika Newlin, The Richmond Times Dispatch, 1984
Spirituals
. . . a gently rhapsodic work, despite its use of a dozen percussion instruments, and it had the audience singing “We Shall Overcome” in its central movement—a moment of hushed magic in the darkened church.
					Joseph McLellan, 1987
Tidal Watch
. . . outstanding. . . beautifully evocative. . . remarkable sounds
					Joseph McLellan, 1983
. . . appealing, colorful. . . An essentially evocative moment came when [Katherine] Hay blew into a giant conch shell	
					Dika Newlin