Bill was born and raised in Starkville, Mississippi, home of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, where his family has helped the university. His great-grandfather, Horace Harned I, ran a dairy farm adjacent to the campus in the 1920s and has the biology building named after him. The Federal Boll Weevil Lab on Sorority Row is named after his brother, Robey Wentworth Harned. Bill got to grow up on his family’s farm across the street from his grandfather, Horace Harned II, who served as a state legislator and inherited the family farm with the second oldest house in the county. Bill’s parents, Horace Harned III and Song, met in South Korea when his father was stationed in Seoul for the Army.
At MSU Bill received Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Engineering and Music. He finished his Master’s in Music from Louisiana State University and had completed credits in Music Therapy at Colorado State University. He achieved his Doctor of Arts degree in Piano Performance from the University of Northern Colorado.
For the World Piano Conference based out of Serbia, Bill presented “An Assessment of Technical Exercises for Piano Majors” in Serbia in 2017. For the 2021 World Piano Conference, Bill submitted a document about the preservation of Afro-centric cross-rhythms with Caribbean rhythmic notations from his dissertation findings. For the 2022 World Piano Conference Online Edition Bill submitted a video entitled “Performance Practice of Misalignment in Stylized Compositions of the Haitian Méringue.”
At the 2023 MTNA National Conference in Reno, Nevada he presented “Performance Practice of Innovative Caribbean Rhythmic Notations in Stylized Compositions of the Haitian Méringue.” In September 2023 he presented “Uses and Categories of Syncopated Rhythm Notation in Piano Art Music from Haiti (Méringue-Quintolet), Puerto Rico (Elastic Tresillo) and Cuba (Cinquillo)” at the symposium “Valorisation des Répertoires Musicaux Classiques Afro-Diasporiques” in Montreal where the SRDMH archive is publicizing its new digital editions of Haitian classical music. He also presented the closing performance with Julio Racine’s Vodou Jazz Flute Sonata with the SRDMH founder’s wife, Edith. For the online version of the 2023 World Piano Conference, he presented “Tresillo-Based Rhythms in Art Music Compositions of the Caribbean and a Quantitative Categorization for Syncopated Rhythms.”
DISSERTATION RESEARCH
His dissertation exposes recently published editions of Haitian music from the SRDMH Archive in Montreal that date back to the first Haitian composers around the 1890s. His study analyzes recently published compositions of the Haitian Méringue that use unique rhythmic notations to provide his own theories about their operation. There are two main findings.
The first is that the Haitian quintolet and Puerto Rican elastic tresillo rhythms preserve Afro-centric cross-rhythms to keep duple and triple rhythms independent of each other with misalignment of the fundamental triple meter with the tresillo rhythm of long-long-short.
(These use a transcription of the fundamental tresillo rhythm of Afro-centric language delivery and folk meters worldwide. Traditional transcriptions of the tresillo-based five-beat syncopated rhythm use the cinquillo rhythm 8th-16th-8th-16th-8th with a common transcription of the tresillo rhythm with a 3:3:2 ratio, which synchronizes with the duple meter. The cinquillo rhythm was used in the country’s first major composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, from New Orleans. The tie to this study is that the emigration of Haitian refugees after their independence doubled the population to influence the hybridization/creolization to develop the jazz musical style.)
The second is a quantitative system to categorize syncopated rhythms, like the swing rhythm and the tresillo-based five-beat syncopated rhythm, by comparing the ratio of the first two notes. This then helps to categorize the three rhythms of the Haitian quintolet, the Puerto Rican elastic tresillo type B rhythm, and the commonly used cinquillo rhythm as different transcriptions of the tresillo based five-beat syncopated rhythm with different “syncopation ratios” based on the difference in value between primary and secondary divisions. Equal values allow more room for the secondary divisions to fluctuate, especially in slower tempos; shorter values (usually 16th notes) are easier to execute.