Meet William “Bill” Ross, music arranger for Andrea Bocelli and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

Just a few weeks ago, the Italian tenor icon that is Andrea Bocelli stood out on an empty plaza in Milan, Italy to give a sweet musical offering to the city and all Italians who have been hit very hard due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

His last song was the classic hymn “Amazing Grace,” and in the on-screen description of the song that appeared before he sang, it featured the name of the arranger as William Ross.

Thinking it would just be one of Andrea’s classical arrangers that he uses for operas and the link, I was shocked to visit William Ross’ website to find this:

The same guy who prepared music for Andrea Bocelli, Barbara Streisand, and Michael Buble, also did arrangements and music for Disney theme park lands?!

I knew then and there that I needed to connect and speak to such person, and so that’s what I did. Please enjoy my unedited chat with William “Bill” Ross in our video above to learn more about his work partnering with Walt Disney Imagineering on creating the music for Galaxy’s Edge, his close partnership with John Williams, and how he hopes music can bring hope to this galaxy amid COVID-19.

Our special thanks to Bill Ross for taking the time to chat for this story! That’s him below conducting the London Symphony Orchestra recording the Galaxy’s Edge suite for the land.

As mentioned in our most previous stories, we are making it a point to highlight human connections amid this current Coronavirus time by sharing unedited video interviews for our stories.

We typically don’t share the “raw” interviews in their entirety as we do pull quotes from our interviewees for the story, but we hope to show you that not only do we take our work seriously, but we absolutely value the people we get to chat with that are much more than a story.