William Wheeler

WSW: When did you start composing?
WW: I began composing at the age of 16. I had an opportunity to take an online composition class offered at my high school, and received a pirated copy of Encore notation software. I went to town from there.

WSW: Do you play an instrument or sing?
WW: I am a clarinetist/bass clarinetist.

WSW: Where do you usually compose?
WW: In my apartment. I have a very fortunate situation in that I live in a concrete box. I can make noise at all times of night and not disturb the neighbors. It’s great for composition and practicing.

WSW: Which composer do you admire?
WW: I’ve always admired Martinů for the consistency of his voice. You can tell a Martinů piece rather quickly from others. I also love the optimism in it, the joie de vivre, as it were. (I’m a very optimistic person). He also has a musical tic, which I sort of love. In a lot of his pieces, there’s always a build up to a big climax, and he creates this immense cadence, which I think is a plagal cadence of sorts. It’s in so many of his pieces, all over his symphonies. You’d think you’d get sick of it, it’s the same effect every time, but it never gets old for me.

Interestingly, this influences my music. Not directly, I don’t use his cadence, but I do have my own ‘musical tic’, which always shows up in my pieces – even back into early college pieces. It’s best described as a melodic motif featuring two ascending perfect 5ths (Evening Star is a good listen). I was worried about repeating myself too much, but I decided if Martinů can have his cadence, I can have my little ‘signature motif,’ if you will.

Vaughan Williams is probably who I’m most modeled after. I write a lot of music in a modal style, (I have my own twists to modality), but I also have other things that I do (City Variations is a great example). I think of it like Vaughan Williams, of course he had his modal masterpieces, The Lark Ascending, London Symphony … but he also has other things he did that were also great, the 4th, 6th, and 9th symphonies, for instance. I don’t think those symphonies are entirely disconnected from his modal style, but the music is so raw and powerful and harmonically different.

I’ve been trying to let my own music develop that way, to have my ‘conservative’ style when I want it, but to also branch out from that into more harmonically extreme music, and then to mix and connect these two disparate nodes of my own compositional language.

WSW: Can you tell us a little about the quintet?
WW: The quintet, City Variations, was an exploratory piece. Most of my pieces come from some emotional place and try to convey a story. This piece was very much about exploring a particular harmonic idea, secundal chords. Nearly all the chords in the piece are built out of 2nds and 7ths (inversion of seconds). I’ve really taken to this harmonic language, and now most of my pieces have some secundal harmony.

The idea to use secundal harmonies also grew out of perfect 5ths. If you stack two 5ths together (like my ‘signature motif’), you get a major 9th (which, compressed into one octave, is a 2nd). I decided, for City Variations, to make 2nds the most important interval in lieu of the 5th.

Another interesting and unusual aspect of the City Variations is the serial melody. I use an 11 note melody, which is introduced in the Oboe early on, as a basis for all the main melodies further on in the piece. I even made a matrix. It’s treated in a very traditional serial manner. The secundal harmonies are built freely around the melody, so I wouldn’t call it a serialist piece, but it does have the serial melody.

WSW: Do you have anything else you want the audience to know about your piece?
WW: It’s an adventure. It’s 8 minutes long, and has 9 sections in it (“Theme”, 7 variations, and Coda). It moves quickly from mood to mood, going through a majestic opening, a dance, a frantic sprint, a march, etc. I talk about secundal harmonies and serial melody, but it never fully abandons tonality. It’s very pretty even at times. I like moments when you feel like you’re in complete chaos, and everything suddenly coalesces, and you can just fall back in the chair and take a breath and enjoy the moment of musical clarity.