William Neely

In addition to teaching Adventures in Classical Music at Santa Rosa Junior College and @ Udemy, Bill has also  taught this course on the Skillfeed and LearnSocial platforms. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and has lived in San Francisco, California since 1977. He attended University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he got his Bachelor's Degree in Music Education, with a minor in Music History and Conducting. After that, he went to University of Colorado in Boulder, where he got a Master's Degree in Vocal Performance. He has been on the faculty of Santa Rosa Junior College since 2000, where he began to develop this music appreciation course for online delivery. Prior to Santa Rosa Junior College, he had taught at Napa Valley College.

In his other life, he is a classical singer in the San Francisco Bay Area, enjoying performing in many operas, musicals and choral concerts. He has sung in the chorus with San Francisco Opera in 11 productions. As a soloist, some of his favorite solo performances have been the title roles of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and Leigh/Wasserman's Man of La Mancha as well as Baron Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca, Count Almaviva in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Danilo in Lehar's The Merry Widow, Voltaire/Pangloss in Bernstein's Candide and most recently, Dr. Falke in Die Fledermaus.