Cindy McTee has been played on NTS in shows including Tafelmusik w/ Francesco Fusaro, featured first on 31 August 2024. Songs played include California Counterpoint "The Twittering Machine".

Cindy McTee was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington and raised in the nearby town of Eatonville. The daughter of musical parents (her father played trumpet and her mother played clarinet), McTee often went to rehearsals of their small dance band where she heard popular music and jazz from the 1940's and 1950's. McTee began piano studies at the age of six with a teacher who encouraged improvisation (the beginnings of her career as a composer) and she began studying saxophone with her mother a few years later.

Another important influence on her musical life was the eminent Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, whom she met in 1974 while majoring in composition at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. Penderecki invited McTee to teach his children English in exchange for composition lessons. She accepted the invitation and spent an entire year in Poland living with the Penderecki family and studying orchestration, twentieth-century composition techniques and counterpoint at the Cracow Academy of Music. Lessons with Penderecki were conducted informally, generally at the family dining room table. She also worked with Marek Stachowski and Krystyna Moszumanska-Nazar while in Poland.

McTee studied with David Robbins and Thomas Clark at Pacific Lutheran University (BM 1975), with Jacob Druckman and Bruce MacCombie at the Yale School of Music (MM 1978), and with Richard Hervig at the University of Iowa (PhD 1981).

McTee taught for three years at her undergraduate alma mater in Tacoma, Washington, and in 1984 joined the faculty of the University of North Texas, receiving promotion to Full Professor in 1995 and to Regents Professor in 2000. In 2009, she was designated a Fellow in UNT's Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. She also participated in leadership roles at UNT, most notably as Chair of the Division of Composition Studies for a total of five years ending in 2000.

In May of 2011, she retired from the University of North Texas as Regents Professor Emerita, and in November of 2011 she married conductor, Leonard Slatkin. Their principal place of residence is in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Ms. McTee has received numerous awards for her music, most significantly: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Composers Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Music Alive Award from Meet The Composer and the League of American Orchestras, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award, and a BMI Student Composers Award. She was also winner of the 2001 Louisville Orchestra Composition Competition.

She has been commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (2009-10), Leonard Slatkin, music director; the Houston Symphony Orchestra (2007), Hans Graf, music director; wind ensemble consortia (2007, 2001); the Amarillo Symphony Orchestra (2006), James Setapen, music director; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (2005 and 2000), Andrew Litton, music director; Bands of America (2004), Eugene Migliaro Corporon, conductor; the National Symphony Orchestra (2002), Leonard Slatkin, music director; the Big Eight Band Directors Association (1995); the American Guild of Organists (1993); the Barlow Endowment (1993); the College Band Directors National Association, Western and Northwestern Divisions (1993); and the Pi Kappa Lambda Board of Regents (1991).

The works of Cindy McTee have received performances by leading ensembles in important venues throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall on five separate occasions. Among the many ensembles to have performed her music are: the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis, the China Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, London's Philharmonia Orchestra, the Lone Star Wind Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Maryland Symphony, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, the North Texas and Dallas Wind Symphonies, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orquestra Simfonica Illes Balears, the Pacific Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the President's Own U.S. Marine Band, the Showa Wind Symphony, Tokyo's NHK Symphony Orchestra, the United States Army Field Band, Voices of Change, the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Bern, Billings, Boston, Chicago, Colorado, Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Flagstaff, Ft. Worth, Hartford, Hawaii, Houston, Indianapolis, Nashville, Novosibirsk, Omaha, Pittsburgh, Puerto Rico, Rochester, San Antonio, Seattle, Shanghai, St. Louis, and Sydney.