Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler is an American composer from Washington, D.C., born in 1952. He works in contemporary classical music and also conducts, teaches, and takes part in a number of music organisations and foundations.

Compositions and commissions

Wheeler receives commissions and performances from orchestras including Minnesota, Houston, Toledo and Indianapolis, as well as from New York City Opera. His work is also performed by singers such as Renée Fleming, Lauren Flanigan and Sanford Sylvan, and by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

His opera Democracy: An American Comedy, with a libretto by Romulus Linney, is commissioned and premiered by Washington National Opera. His chamber symphony City of Shadows is commissioned by Kent Nagano and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin and premiered in a portrait concert of his music at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie.

He also has commissions for an opera for the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theatre, along with projects for the Mirror Visions Ensemble, Boston Cecilia, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, the Marilyn Horne Foundation, the ASCAP Foundation, the Barlow Foundation and Concert Artists Guild.

Recordings

There are two recordings of Wheeler’s music in the Naxos American Classics series. One is a disc of songs for voice and piano titled Wasting the Night; the other is the one-act opera The Construction of Boston. The Gramercy Trio and friends also record a disc of his music for strings and piano on Newport Classic. Other recordings of his music appear on GM, New World, Bridge and other labels.

Conducting and teaching

As a conductor, Wheeler appears with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin, the Chamber Ensemble of St. Luke’s in New York, the Wellesley Composers Conference and Dinosaur Annex. His conducting is heard on the Bridge, CRI, Capstone and Newport Classic labels. At Emerson College, he also conducts productions of musical theatre works by Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim and others.

He teaches at Emerson College in Boston, where he co-directs the BFA programme in musical theatre.

Education, awards and professional roles

Wheeler studies at Amherst College, New England Conservatory and Brandeis University. His principal teachers are Lewis Spratlan and Arthur Berger. He continues his study at the Tanglewood Music Center with Olivier Messiaen, at the Dartington School with Peter Maxwell Davies, and privately with Virgil Thomson.

He receives awards and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, Tanglewood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He also receives the Stoeger Prize for excellence in chamber music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the 2010 Composer of the Year Award from the Classical Recording Foundation. He is a Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007.

Organisations

Wheeler is a founding member of the new-music ensemble Dinosaur Annex. He serves on the board of directors of the Virgil Thomson Foundation, sits on the advisory board of the Bogliasco Foundation, is on the education board of the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, and is a director of Antilever Press. He is Composer in Residence with Boston Cecilia.