Bill Connor has made his living as a composer since the 1970s working across many genres and media from rock and jazz to the symphony orchestra. Through the 70s he worked as a session musician and arranger with various artists in the rock and light entertainment worlds of recording, TV and radio, as well as arranging and writing for the various BBC radio orchestras. He has worked as composer and conductor with many orchestras across the world including the Halle, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Goldberg Ensemble, Manchester Camerata, BBC Singers, Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He was Composer-in-Residence (1996-99) with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Australia with a particular focus on music/drama in the community.

Bill Connor’s work in the community, especially with young people, has brought together traditional performance practices with communal composition and group improvisation. For the last twenty years he has been devising and leading large-scale music/drama projects in many countries across the world, many of which have been multi-lingual and multi-cultural, using music and drama as a means of communication between participants who are often from different ethnic, cultural and language backgrounds. These projects can be based in schools through the medium of English, the work place and the wider community with people of all ages. Content is derived from the participants’ own ideas and expressed through any chosen art form supported by the relevant professional practitioners, i.e. music/drama/dance/technology, and sometimes bringing together distant communities through the medium of film and video.

Examples of his educational work have included:

Music and drama projects for the BBC Philharmonic in the community and Strangeways prison, including a community opera for the 75th anniversary of the BBC.

Through BBC Music Live 2000, he worked with children in Soweto and Cheshire UK to produce a bi-lingual song for simultaneous television performance in South Africa and the UK.  

Since 2000, at the behest of the British Council, he has been working with the Sibenik International Children’s Festival in Croatia with schools and community groups to create new music/theatre work through improvisation, collaborative story telling and communal composition.