Andrew McKinley, an operatic tenor who also taught violin at the Juilliard School of Music and founded the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts in Huntington, N.Y., has died at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Medical Center in New York City. He was 92 and lived in Manhattan.
As a performer, McKinley was best known for his televised opera performances. He appeared in several NBC Opera productions in the 1950s, including the premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and Britten's "Billy Budd." He also performed at La Scala, at the Metropolitan Opera and at Glyndebourne and in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. He created the role of Nika Magdoff, the singing magician, in Menotti's "Consul" in 1950.But McKinley began and ended his musical career as a violinist. He was born in Pittsburgh and moved to New York in 1922 to study the violin at the Institute of Musical Art, which later became the Juilliard School. In the early 1930s he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, where he taught until 1970.
McKinley also had a third career as an administrator. He was the director of the Bronx House Music School from 1923 to 1968. In 1968 he opened the Usdan Center, a 250-acre camp where young students could study art, dance and music.