About Bill Rea

Bill Rea is a composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist. His musical background and training are unusual and varied.  At an early age, he studied the theory and counterpoint methods of Palestrina, Walter Piston, and Paul Hindemith. Primarily self-taught as a composer, his only formal compositional studies were from 1991 to 1997 with Hannetta Clark, former assistant to composers Arnold Schoenberg, Ingolf Dahl, and Halsey Stevens. Throughout the 1990’s he also studied cello with Alice Williams at the Georgia Academy of Music in Atlanta.

Bill’s primary performing experience throughout his career has been his forty-five years as bassist, and occasional guitarist and keyboardist, with the groundbreaking and innovative guitarist Glenn Phillips, and The Supreme Court. As cellist he has performed with The DeKalb Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, as a founding member of the Rea Vaughan Trio, and with other chamber ensembles.

Bill has written chamber works, compositions for piano, harpsichord, voice, percussion, electric bass guitar, orchestra, various chamber ensembles, works for dance, and music for film. His music often extends beyond concert music and includes interdisciplinary compositions (The Astral Sequence Project) that explore the possibilities of mixed media settings. Two of his piano works were highlighted on the 2004 Innova recording “Through an Open Window”, performed by pianist Lucy Wenger, and produced by Grammy winner David Frost. This album features Rea’s “A Dissimulation of Birds” and “Variations on an Irish Song (Down by the Salley Gardens)”.

Bill has been featured as artist or composer on numerous recording labels including Innova Records, Virgin Records, Shanachie, Snow Star, ESD (Minneapolis), SST, and DB Records. In January, 2005 PBS radio aired an hour long program on the “Atlanta Music Scene” dedicated entirely to his music. In December, 2023 his piano composition, “Variations on an Irish Song (Down by the Salley Gardens)” was featured on the radio broadcast, “Between the Keys”, hosted by Jed Distler. Also, in 2023 Bill was interviewed by William Ford of AtlantaMusicCritic.com. in a 37-minute discussion of his background and musical aesthetics.

Commissions for Bill’s compositions have come from choreographer Gabrielle Mertz (Ondine and Company Dance), Atlanta Council for the Arts, the Cultural Olympics (Atlanta 1996), performers Laura Gordy and Peggy Benkeser of Thamyris, DaVid Pineda and Tirza Kosche of the Atlanta Chamber Orchestra, Lucy Wenger, Mayu Tsuda, David Buice and Duncan MacMillan. In 2000 he was the recipient of the Georgia Composer of the Year Award given by the Music Teachers National Association. His Toccata for Piano was performed by pianist Tracy Xian as the encore for the opening recital of the Tobias Matthay International Piano Festival in 2010.

Many of Bill’s compositions have been featured as film scores in collaboration with his wife Roxanne Rea. Roxanne is a filmmaker whose videos, “visualized music”, are a highly imaginative and creative pairing of image and sound. She has also collaborated with award winning composers Dick Robinson and Debra Kaye.

In 1989 Bill and Roxanne, in partnership with Roxanne’s parents Betty and William Hutchins, founded Hutchins & Rea, world-wide distributors of classical print music. Bill and Roxanne owned and operated Hutchins & Rea for thirty years, until their retirement from the retail world in 2019.