Janet Wheeler enjoys working with a wide variety of choirs encompassing all age groups and sizes. For the past 17 years she has directed the Saffron Walden Choral Society and has worked with many other adult groups including Cantores Decem, the Staplehurst Singers, the Orpheus Choir of North Herts, the New Cambridge Singers, the Brocket Consort, Carillon and the Saffron Walden Singers. She also has a wealth of experience of working with school choirs, both junior and senior, individually and massed, and in both the recording studio and on the concert platform.
While reading music at Cambridge, she was very active chorally, both as singer and conductor. Her teachers included John Rutter and she studied composition with Robin Holloway and piano with Hilda Bor. She then taught music for eight years before joining BBC School Radio as a music producer. She worked on such series as Singing Together and Music Workshop and composed many children’s pieces at this time, including the musical Orpheus (with librettist Nick Warburton).
Her recent compositions are mainly choral. Sea Changes is a choral and orchestral setting of a story by Kevin Crossley-Holland, commissioned by SWCS, which was first performed in Spring 2004 and again the following year. Collaborating again with the writer Nick Warburton she wrote the cantata Train in the Rain for children’s choir, adult choir, keyboards and narrator. This was performed in Summer 2005. They subsequently produced On the Breath of the Sky, evoking the life of the albatross and the threats it faces, as the centrepiece of the Wingbeats concerts in 2007.