Bill Gottshall

Bill Gottshall is a playwright and composer who has written several stage plays and has composed or arranged more than 100 pieces of music for vocal and instrumental ensembles. Gottshall also serves as a teaching artist with two different non-profit educational foundations. Delaware Valley Arts Institute, based in Doylestown, PA brings working artists into schools so that the students can have close access to the professional creative process. Gottshall also works for Arts of Anyone, based in Lawrenceville, NJ. As a staff composer in their Living Bookshelf program, Gottshall helps students adapt works of children’s fiction for the Broadway stage. The culmination of this process is a public performance of the students’ work by current Broadway performers.

Gottshall graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1978 with a degree in music composition. In 1979, he studied jazz arranging and orchestration with Don Sebesky, this year’s Tony Award-winning Best Orchestrator (Kiss Me Kate). During the 1980’s, Gottshall was an Assistant to the Music Director on the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical My One and Only, during its pre-Broadway run in Boston and he held the same position in the Off-Broadway Motown musical revue Dancin’ in the Street!, directed by Tony Award-winner Billy Wilson (Bubblin’ Brown Sugar).

Piano is Gottshall’s principal instrument is piano, but he studied trumpet for ten years, both in the Philadelphia area and at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. His teachers included Barry Mertz, Milliard Hensel, and Jeff Stout. In New York City, Gottshall was a classmate of the world-renowned jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis.

Bill frequently performs jazz in the Philadelphia area, both as a solo performer and with small combos. He has played onstage with the legendary Bo Diddley and with vocalist Julius LaRosa, as well as rehearsal pianist for several Broadway stars, including Tommy Tune and the world’s first supermodel, Twiggy.

Tags