William Zeitler

✣ Musician

Composer

  • William has composed original music for eight CDs to date (click here)
  • He composes for film scores. The hour-long documentary Entre Marte & Svalbard (Between Mars & Svalbard) for which William composed the film score aired on RTP2 (the Portuguese equivalent of PBS).
  • Commissions include:
    • University of Redlands, CA Wind Ensemble
    • Musicians of the King’s Road (Finland)
    • Texas A&M
    • Orchestra Seattle
    • Seattle Philharmonic
    • I Cantori di Carmel (Monterey, CA)
  • William is a member of ASCAP

Glass Armonica

William is one of the few professional players in the world on the ‘glass armonica’ — an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761 (it works on the ‘wet finger around the wine glass’ idea). William has performed on the glass armonica internationally, including at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and with the Blue Man Group at the Hollywood Bowl. Playing the glass armonica, William was also a 'clue' on Jeopardy (filmed 2017 Dec 6, air date 2018 March 21).

He has also performed on film scores including as HBO’s Taking Chance and the feature films Big Hero 6 and Beautiful Creatures.

With the Blue Man Group
at the Hollywood Bowl (YouTube)		 With "Musicians of the
King’s Road" in Finland
At Texas A & M On the sound stage of Fox Studios in Hollywood,
this time for "Big Hero 6", score by Henry Jackson

Clavier

William is also a professional pianist, organist and harpsichordist.

In Hong Kong At Redlands, CA United
Methodist Church (YouTube)

✣ Author

In 2013 William published the first book-length history of the glass armonica: The Glass Armonica — the Music and the Madness, a project which took 14 years of research to track down the primary sources and piece together the story (far stranger than I could have imagined at the outset). The book includes extensive translations into English for the first time of significant documents in the history of the glass armonica from their original Latin, French, and German (more about the book, click here).

William has also published a book on Musical Gematria (click here)

A sample page of archaic German
which William translated for
his book on the glass armonica
(click for larger view)

Mathematics

Instructor at Monterey Peninsula College (3 years) teaching primarily Statistics and Algebra

Education

  • BFA in Harpsichord, California Institute of the Arts (for my senior recital I played the Bach Goldberg Variations from memory on a harpsichord I had rebuilt)
  • Paid my own way through this private college by supplementing a California State Academic scholarship (which covered about 30% of my tuition) with my own music business — playing music, teaching students, building harpsichords and restoring pianos in my workshop.