William David Cooper is a composer, conductor and organist based in Boston, MA. His opera Hagar and Ishmael has been featured by Fort Worth Opera, West Edge Opera, and the National Opera Association, and has been praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for its “richly soaring vocal lines.” In 2024, his cantata When Peace Was Far Away was commissioned by Walnut Hill School for the Arts. His St. Luke Passion and Requiem were recently commissioned by St. Peter’s Church, NYC, and his choral music has also been performed by The New York Virtuoso Singers, and C4. He is the recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards, including the Leo Kaplan Prize, and the American Prize. He has received fellowships from the Aspen Music Festival, the Composers Conference, Brush Creek, I-Park, Ucross and VCCA. His chamber music has been featured on several recently released recordings, including Mirrors (Lysander Trio, First Hand Records, 2021) and Nong (gamin, Innova Records, 2020). An alumnus of the Juilliard School and UC Davis, Cooper serves as Head of Theory and Composition at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, and as Director of Music at Wellesley Hills Congregational Church (MA).