William Harvey, the founder and executive director of Cultures in Harmony, has recently been named the Violin and Viola Teacher for the Ministry of Education in Kabul, Afghanistan, a post he will hold concurrently with his position with CiH. He will teach at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.
In December 2007, he made his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Youth Symphony, playing with "fire and assurance" according to the New York Times. Previously that year, he gave the Filipino premiere of the Elgar Concerto with the Manila Symphony and toured Qatar with the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble. Before graduating from the The Juilliard School, where he studied with Ronald Copes, he won the school's concerto composition, giving the New York premiere of Behzad Ranjbaran's Violin Concerto with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. That performance has been broadcast twice on NPR's Performance Today.
He has served as concertmaster of the Spokane Symphony and the Juilliard Orchestra and soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Music Academy of the West Festival Orchestra. He taught at the Indiana University String Academy and the Las Vegas Music Festival and has given master classes at the Escuela Superior de Musica (Mexico City), St. Scholastica's College (Manila), and Whitworth College (Spokane). He served as a Fellow at Carnegie Hall's Academy.
As a conductor, he has led the Youth Orchestra of Mexico City and the PREDIS program (Manila) in concert, as well as the Blue Hill Strings. An avid performer of modern music, he has collaborated with Joan Tower, Herbie Hancock, the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, and the Da Capo Chamber Players. He played Milton Babbitt's Melismata in a concert honoring the composer's ninetieth birthday. In 2002, he gave the first performance west of New York City of the Sonata for Solo Violin (1919) by Artur Schnabel.
A firm believer in outreach concerts, William famously performed for members of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth regiment on September 16, 2001, as they recuperated from a long day of rescue and clean-up work at Ground Zero. In January 2009, he partnered with Culturarte to found Juntos con Vecinos, an initiative designed to help integrate the Dominican and non-Dominican communities in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. William earned a Bachelor's of Music with highest distinction from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with Ilya Kaler and Mimi Zweig.
His compositions have received over a hundred performances. In 2006, Cuerpo Garrido won Columbia University's Bearns Prize. In 2005, When I Have Fears for soprano and piano premiered at the Wolf Trap Festival in Virginia, with a repeat performance at New York Festival of Song. The Indiana University String Academy commissions him frequently, playing his works for strings all over the mid-western United States, central France, and Japan. His pieces have been performed on national radio (From the Top, NPR) and television (Musical Encounters, PBS). William's composition teachers include Samuel Adler and Sven-David Sandstrom.
Born in 1982, William grew up in Indianapolis with his father Jay Harvey, a journalist for the Indianapolis Star; his mother Susan Raccoli, a church musician; and his brother Theodore, associate principal cello of the Dallas Symphony.
