William Zeitler has been a musician since 5 years old. In high school, William built his own harpsichord from a kit and went on to attend the California Institute of the Arts where he earned a degree in harpsichord. An academic scholarship covered about half of his tuition — William earned the rest, plus his living expenses, as a professional musician and piano technician.

William has been a professional musician ever since, except for a few years as a college mathematics instructor, and a few years as a software engineer at Microsoft.

In 1995 William chanced on a recording of music by Mozart and contemporaries for the glass armonica. “This is wonderful, I’m doing this!” The glasses for his instrument were blown by Gerhard Finkenbeiner in Boston, MA, and the rest fabricated by various artisans in the Seattle area where William lived at the time. It took a year to build his instrument. Then William had to figure out how to play it as he couldn’t find any teachers.

In November 2011 William performed on the glass armonica at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in their production of Lucia di Lammermoor (in the famous ‘mad scene’ there is an approximately 15 minute duet between the armonica and Lucia). In 2013 William played Lucia again with the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. William also plays the glass armonica for film scores — recently HBO’s Taking Chance and the feature film Beautiful Creatures.

William also composes film scores himself for educational and documentary films. Entre Marte & Svalbard (Between Mars & Svalbard) — for which he composed the film score — aired on Portuguese national TV (RTP2) April 2012.

William has recorded 8 CDs of his own music to date. William is also a sought after pianist and organist.