William Harvey

Performed at the 69th Regiment Armory on September 16, 2001, for soldiers as they were returning from a long day of rescue and clean-up work at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center.

The first American concertmaster of Mexico's premier orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, violinist, composer, conductor, and educator William Harvey has forged a unique international career that has taken him from Carnegie Hall to the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the streets of Kabul. From 2010 to 2014, he taught violin and conducted the orchestra at Afghanistan National Institute of Music on Afghan national television, for President Karzai, and on tour to sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. He has served as concertmaster of OSSLA (Mexico), Orquesta Sinfónica de la UNSJ (Argentina), and the Spokane Symphony (USA), as well as guest faculty at Indiana University String Academy, Myanmar Music Festival, and Mehli Mehta Music Foundation (at the invitation of Zubin Mehta), among others. He holds a Masters from the Juilliard School and Bachelors from Indiana University, where he studied with Mimi Zweig (first teacher of Joshua Bell) and participated in the Violin Virtuosi Ensemble. He has since performed concerti with orchestras in the USA, the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina. His compositions have received over a hundred performances worldwide, and as a conductor he has led youth orchestras in the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and Qatar, among others. As the founder and director of the non-profit Cultures in Harmony, he conducted nearly 40 cultural diplomacy projects in 16 countries from Pakistan to Cameroon.

In 2016, he traveled to every US state for one week for Cultures in Harmony's "What is American culture?" project, soliciting answers to that question in the form of concerts, seminars, workshops, video interviews, and social media updates.