Biography
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Born
24 February 1952 (age 72)
Scott Wheeler has received commissions and performances from the orchestras of Minnesota, Houston, Toledo and Indianapolis, as well as New York City Opera, sopranos Renée Fleming and Lauren Flanigan, baritone Sanford Sylvan, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Scott Wheeler’s opera Democracy: An American Comedy, on a libretto of Romulus Linney, was commissioned and premiered by the Washington National Opera. His chamber symphony City of Shadows was commissioned by Kent Nagano and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin and premiered by them on a portrait concert of the music of Scott Wheeler at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie.
Scott Wheeler’s most recent commission is for an opera for the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theatre. Other current and recent commissions include 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.
There are two recordings of Scott Wheeler’s music on the Naxos American Classics series. The latest of these is a CD of songs for voice and piano, entitled Wasting the Night. The first Naxos disc is of the one-act opera The Construction of Boston. The Gramercy Trio and friends have recorded a disc of Scott’s music for strings and piano on Newport Classic. Other recordings are available on GM, New World, Bridge and other labels.
As a conductor, Scott Wheeler has appeared with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin, the Chamber Ensemble of St. Luke’s in New York, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and Dinosaur Annex. His conducting can be heard on the Bridge, CRI, Capstone and Newport Classic labels. At Emerson College, Wheeler has also conducted productions of the musical theatre works of Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim and many others.
Scott Wheeler studied at Amherst College, New England Conservatory and Brandeis University; his principal teachers were Lewis Spratlan and Arthur Berger. He pursued further study at the Tanglewood Music Center (with Olivier Messiaen), the Dartington School (with Peter Maxwell Davies) and privately with Virgil Thomson. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston, where he co-directs the BFA program in musical theatre. He is a founding member of the new-music ensemble Dinosaur Annex.
He has received awards and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitsky Foundation (2), the Fromm Foundation (2), Tanglewood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (3), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2), Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the Stoeger Prize for excellence in chamber music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He was a Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007. He is the 2010 recipient of the Composer of the Year Award from the Classical Recording Foundation.
Scott Wheeler is a member of the Board of Directors of the Virgil Thomson Foundation, a member of the Advisory Board of the Bogliasco Foundation, a member of the Education Board of the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, a director of Antilever Press, and Composer in Residence with Boston Cecilia.
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