Scott Wheeler’s opera Democracy was commissioned by Plácido Domingo and premièred by Washington National Opera. His first opera, The Construction of Boston, is available on Naxos American Opera Classics 8.669018. His third opera has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theatre.

Wheeler is the recipient of the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, Fromm and Bogliasco Foundations, and from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Berlin.

His music has been performed by conductor Kent Nagano, sopranos Renée Fleming and Lauren Flanigan, and many orchestras in the US and Europe. His teachers include Virgil Thomson, Lewis Spratlan, Peter Maxwell Davies and Olivier Messiaen. As a conductor, Wheeler has appeared with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin, the Chamber Ensemble of St Luke’s in New York, and Dinosaur Annex, of which he is a founding director. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.