Picture credit: Jonathan LuckePicture credit: Jonathan LuckeWilliam Rehwinkel (1999-) is an organist, harpsichordist and composer based in New Jersey. He has completed his Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts at Oberlin Conservatory in Organ Performance and Computer Science, and he is currently enrolled at the Juilliard School as a harpsichord major.
Around 2010, William was introduced to the organ by Joe Guthrie at First Congregational Church, Palo Alto, CA. After this he started lessons with Angela Kraft Cross. After moving to New Jersey he studied with Mark Miller, and at Oberlin Conservatory he studied with professors Jonathan Moyer and Christa Rakich. William has performed in masterclasses for professors including David Higgs, Guy Bovet and Janette Fishell, and also received instruction from Jean-Baptiste Robin while a student at Oberlin.
On the harpsichord, William's first teacher was Tamara Loring in San Francisco, CA. At Oberlin he studied the harpsichord with Catalina Vicens, Mark Edwards, and finally with visiting professor Lillian Gordis. at Juilliard he is studying with Peter Sykes and Béatrice Martin. Some notable performances for William on the Harpsichord include a performance of the Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering by J.S. Bach with the ensemble "Musica Ignota" in Spring, 2024, the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto by Bach in the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra in Fall, 2023, and Selections from "L'apothéose de Lully" by Francois Couperin and the Concerto Grosso "Delerium Amoris" by Georg Muffat, both at Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin in Summer, 2024.
In addition to performing music, William also composes music. His teachers include Mark Miller and Rolando Gomez. In composing music, William's interests lie with combining his inspirations from the organ and early music, including modern organ composers like Jehan Alain, Jean Langlais and Charles Tournemire, romantic and modern musical styles including impressionism, and ensemble music from the baroque period and compositional techniques such as how the harpsichord and viola da gamba or cello play basso continuo together, into new music written for the organ, other instruments, and eventually for chamber ensembles.
In high school William served as the Organ Scholar at Christ Church, Summit, NJ, with Mark Miller, Director of Music. Starting in 2021 William has served as Organist at First Congregational Church, Westfield, NJ, with Joe Regan, Music Director.
William conducts independent research in early organ music. This includes looking at scans of manuscripts which have been made available online by libraries around the world and inspecting manuscripts from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University in person, and making his own feeble attempts at scholarly critical editions of music found in these hand-written manuscripts.
In 2021, William conducted research about the pipe organ at First Congregational Church, Westfield, NJ, for its 50th anniversary celebration. For this project, he wrote a brochure containing information about the organ, Austin Organs Inc. op. 2546, and also performed an anniversary celebration concert.
In addition to musical adventures, William combines his undergraduate majors by operating several websites dedicated to other organists, musicians and artists. He operates and also writes articles for a pipe organ wiki dedicated to all aspects of the organ and its music. He also runs a video-sharing page where artists are encouraged to upload videos of their works and performances in a smaller more focused community. Besides these, he runs a static file server which he uses to upload many things which he hopes are useful for other organists, including scores, images, archives of other webpages, and lossless microphone demo audio files.
Besides this, William enjoys producing electronic music, is an avid user of open-source applications including FFMPEG, Lilypond, LibreOffice and instances on the Fediverse (including Mastodon and Peertube), creates memes about the organ and early music on Instagram, struggles to learn German, and watches Formula1 and other motorsports series.
