William Ashworth is an award-winning author and composer who lives in Ashland, Oregon. He holds a BA in music from Whitman College (Walla Walla, Washington) and an MA in theory and composition from Washington State University (Pullman), plus two years' further graduate work in theory, composition and music history at Washington State and the University of Washington. His teachers included William H. Bailey (a student of Arnold Schoenberg), Loran Olsen (a student of Nadia Boulanger) and Robert Soderberg. He held a teaching assistantship in theory at Washington State, where he also founded and directed the University Consort, a Renaissance performing group. His performance skills include voice (bass-baritone), guitar, recorder, and choral conducting; he has also performed in folk-dance bands (Irish and international) for many years, playing guitar, pennywhistle, kaval, and Celtic harp.

As a composer, Ashworth writes primarily in a modified neoromantic style that combines warm melodies and consonant harmonies with extreme chromaticism and a lack of a true tonal center. He often works from a twelve-tone row, relaxing the rules of dodecaphonic procedure just enough to keep most of the vertical structures of the music triadic and most of the voice leading stepwise. Most of his output is chamber music, often including voice. His works have been performed by the Philadelphia String Quartet, the Washington State University Concert Choir, the Whitman College Cello Choir, clarinetist Max McKee, cellists Lisa Truelove (with pianist Stephen Truelove) and Ed Dixon (with pianist Eleanor Elkins James), and the chamber ensemble SyZyGy. He has also performed his own work for classical guitar. In his nonmusical life, Ashworth has written thirteen books on environmental activism and natural history, including The Late, Great Lakes (Knopf, 1986: a Colonial Dames of America Notable Book for 1987), The Encyclopedia of Environmental Studies (Facts on File, 1991; now in its third edition), The Left Hand of Eden (Oregon State University Press, 1999: winner of the Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction), and Ogallala Blue (Norton, 2006: a Kansas Notable Book for 2007 and a finalist for the Great Plains Book Award for 2006). He also served as a reference librarian with the Jackson County (Oregon) Library System for eighteen years, from July 1986 through October 2002. Check out my webpage.