Dr. Bill O'Neil has been on the faculty of the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley (formerly the University of Texas-Pan American) since 1992. After completing his Doctorate of Musical Arts in clarinet at the University of Minnesota in 1990 as a student of Dr. John Anderson, he held one-year appointments at Utah State University and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Along the way he has taught part-time at colleges in Nebraska, Minnesota, and Texas.
He is a longtime orchestral player, having performed with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony, and with the Valley Symphony, with which he has been co-principal clarinetist since 1994 and has been a featured soloist twice.
Bill is a passionate chamber musician, finding special delight in music for clarinet and strings, a natural development since his wife Gail is a violinist and two of his daughters are cellists. Bill is a prolific arranger of music for clarinet and/or saxophone solo and ensemble. His clarinet choir arrangement of Peter and the Wolf was premiered at ClarinetFest 2014 in Baton Rouge with the combined clarinet choirs of the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses of UT-RGV. In July of 2015, he took his clarinet choir to Madrid, Spain for ClarinetFest 2015, where the group performed his arrangement of Antonio Romero's Fantasia on themes from Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. Both works, and many others as well, have been published by RGM Music in Wisconsin. Bill and Gail have three grown daughters with a total of six (and counting) grandkids and several cats.
