Biography

“Professor Stevens has created a wonderful four-semester sequenced approach to pitch and rhythmic sight singing,    as well as harmonic hearing that works in lockstep with our musicianship program. For many years the Frost School of Music has been in search of a sight singing textbook that expands the technical abilities of our students and deepens their inner ear through melody, harmony and rhythm. We have found it in Professor Stevens’s Melody and Rhythm.”
Dr. Shawn Crouch, Frost School of Music

Bill is a teaching professor at Santa Clara University, where he directs the Musicianship program.

Bill is artistic director and pianist for Emerald Isle Jazz Nights, a summer concert series on Emerald Isle North Carolina. Guest artists have included Natalie Boeyink, Joe Brotherton, Janinah Burnett, Dillon Goodson, Steve Haines, Benny Hill, Randy Johnston, Cal Richardson, Will Snyder, Mike Stevens, Kobie Watkins, and Chloe White.

Bill is the author of Jazz Musicianship, a Guidebook for Integrated Learning, a wholistic approach to learning jazz theory and improvisation.

“Your book holds a place of honor, in my jazz library, next to Baker, Coker and Levine – keeping ‘fast’ company – but much deserved.” — Steve Crews

Bill is an alumni of The Oberlin Conservatory, graduating Pi Kappa Lambda in 2000 with a major in Music Composition and an independently designed major in Oral Music – focusing on listening and improvisation. His teachers included John Luther Adams, Randolph Coleman, Param Vir, Sanford Margolis, and Neal Creque. He has a Masters Degree in Piano Performance from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, graduating with honors in 2002, where he studied with Andrew Willis.

Bill was on the faculty of The Walden School’s Young Musicians’ Program from 2000 to 2010 and Teacher Training Institute from 2006 through 2011. He has been exploring how to apply the unique pedagogy of Grace Cushman’s Creative Musicianship Program, as handed down by her students across multiple generations, to jazz instruction since 2000 and has offered classes in Jazz Musicianship since 2001.

As a young composer, Bill’s work received national recognition. He was named a level 1 Arts finalist by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts (NFAA) and received The Presidential Scholars award in the arts (1995), meeting President Clinton and conducting an original work, “Archtypical Emergence”, at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Bill holds a Three-Year Teaching Certificate in Deep Listening ™ from The Deep Listening Institute. He has also served a years apprenticeship with composer Pauline Oliveros, studying and teaching Deep Listening under her mentorship. Deep Listening is a practice of listening to sounds with meditative awareness, using this awareness as a point of entry into creativity in general and improvisation in particular. Curious about the relationship between creativity, meditation, and psychological process, Bill enrolled in The Helix Training Program in New York City, a four year self-transformational training whose mission is to bring together the divide between psychological and spiritual teachings around growth and healing. Continuing to pursue an interest in healing work, Bill completed a three-year course of study in Somatic Experiencing and is a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). Somatic Experiencing is a modality concerned with restoring optimal functioning of the nervous system in the wake of overwhelming life experiences, helping people to be more fully in the present moment – a key component of creative flow, improvisation, and conscious living.

Being legally blind since birth and almost totally blind since age 14, Bill is an outreach ambassador for Open Floor International, recording Dancing with Blindness, a collaboration with videographer Vic Cooper. He has appeared on The Today Show with then guide dog Wrangler.