Janet Wheeler

Composer

Janet Wheeler is a freelance composer, choral conductor and teacher.

A junior exhibitioner at the Guildhall School of Music from the age of 10, Janet went on to read music at Cambridge where she studied composition with Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood. After running a secondary school music department, she became a music producer for BBC Schools Radio primary music for eight years.

Janet has conducted choirs of all sizes and singers of all ages, including the New Cambridge Singers, the Orpheus Choir of North Herts and Carillon, the Saffron Walden Choral Society, the chamber choir Granta Chorale and the youth choir SignuptoSing. She arranges and composes for many primary and secondary school orchestras and choirs, and plans and directs large-scale community singing events such as Wingbeats, a partnership project with RSPB and SWCS. For Wingbeats she has composed the cantatas On the Breath of the Sky and Train in the Rain with writer Nick Warburton, and the children’s musical Orpheus for BBC Schools Radio.

Her first large-scale work for choir and orchestra was Sea Tongue (2004), setting a text by Kevin Crossley Holland that tells the story of the disappearing coastline at Dunwich. In 2012 she completed two new choral and orchestral works. MAZE was performed by combined choirs with Britten Sinfonia in March as part of MazeMusic, a Music Nation concert. Magnificat cum Angelis was commissioned by Yellow Car Charitable Trust and premiered by Granta Chorale in May 2012.