Bill Jones received his Bachelor of Music Education degree from SUNY Potsdam, and his Master of Music in piano performance from Boston University, where he studied with Bela Nagy. In 1965, Bill received a Leopold Schepp Foundation grant to study the 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas with Nadia Boulanger at Palais de Fontainebleau (Fontainebleau, France). While there, he studied piano with Jean Casadesus and Jean Painchaud. At Fontainebleau, Nadia Boulanger asked him to perform Maurice Ravel’s Valses Nobles & Sentimentales in the master class of Robert Casadesus.
From 1966-1971, Bill was assistant professor of music at SUNY Plattsburgh, and then worked for 18 years as a public school music teacher in New York State. Bill was also adjunct faculty at SUNY Albany and Schenectady County Community College. In the summer of 1988 he attended graduate classes in music therapy at New York University. In 1989 he received a Bachelor of Music Therapy degree from SUNY New Paltz. He then spent 15 years as a music therapist at Parsons Child & Family Center in Albany, NY, where he worked with children with autism, Down syndrome, and other behavioral disorders.
After his BU graduation in 1965, Bill studied private piano for 3 years with Russian-American pianist Alexander Borovsky (1889-1968) at Borovsky's Waban, MA home. Bill continues to research Borovsky’s life, utilizing Borovsky's 555 pages of unpublished memoirs. The website https://www.alexanderkborovsky.blogspot.com documents this research.
Bill has studied privately with pianists Vladimir Feltsman and Charles Reiner at McGill University (Montreal), and has performed in the master classes of Ivan Moravec and Valentin Gheorghiu. He has also attended the master classes of Clifford Curzon, Artur Rubinstein, Lili Kraus, R. Firkusny, Idil Biret and Jerome Rose.
In 1985, Bill performed in a live recital with FM broadcast at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) as part of the “Treasure Houses of England” exhibit. In 2005, Bill was invited by Steinway & Sons and Garritan Libraries to help record Steinway's finest Model D piano at Troy Music Hall (world-renowned for its acoustics), for Garritan's Virtual Steinway library. Read an article about the project here. After several days of playing single-note samples of the Model D, Bill was able to record several pieces on it at the music hall, which you can hear in the "Listen" section.
Bill has served as a piano adjudicator for NYSSMA and MTNA. When he was 12, he began serving as organist in his home church in Oswego NY, and has continued serving as a permanent and substitute organist and choir director in several churches. Bill retired in 2014, after 15 years as organist and choir director of Slingerlands Methodist Church (Slingerlands, NY). Bill and his wife Kathryn moved to Waynesboro, GA in August 2018 from Delmar, NY.
