American musician William Harvey has appeared as violin soloist at Carnegie Hall and has performed solo with orchestras in the Philippines, Mexico, and USA. For four years, he taught violin at Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), where he founded the Afghan Youth Orchestra (AYO), which he conducted eight times for President Karzai and led on a tour of the USA that he also coordinated and for which he raised the funding. On that tour, he conducted AYO in his own arrangements at sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. In 2012 and 2013, he led them on the season finales of Afghan Star, the hugely popular televised singing contest on which he was a guest judge in 2011.
He lives in San Juan, Argentina, where he serves as concertmaster of the Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Recently, he was a guest musician at the Myanmar Music Festival and Iguazu en Concierto (Argentina). Mr. Harvey’s compositions have received over a hundred performances. Mr. Harvey earned his M.M. from The Juilliard School and B.M. from Indiana University.
In 2005, Mr. Harvey founded Cultures in Harmony (CiH), an NGO that promotes cultural understanding through music. In 2010, CiH was named a Best Practice in International Cultural Engagement (along with the Kennedy Center & Library of Congress) by the US Center for Citizen Diplomacy. CiH workshops in Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, the Philippines, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, and Mexico have benefited thousands of young musicians. Mr. Harvey has maintained a cultural diplomacy blog since 2005.
