As a choral director, Janet Wheeler has worked with a wide variety of groups including the Orpheus Choir of North Herts., the New Cambridge Singers, the Brocket Consort and St. Albans-based Carillon. 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.

This will be her seventeenth season as director of SWCS. During those years the choir has grown and developed and it now attracts singers from a wide geographical area. She also directs the Saffron Walden Singers, a small self-selecting group of the choral society, which has made five visits to venues in France and Belgium.

While reading music at Cambridge she studied composition with Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway. She then taught music for eight years before joining BBC School Radio as a music producer. This involved composition and arrangement as well as script-writing and production. For children she has composed many songs and a number of musicals, including Orpheus (with librettist Nick Warburton), which was broadcast by BBC School Radio in 1995, and which is still performed by schools around the country.

Janet composes mainly choral music. As well as many small pieces, her recent, larger works have included Sea Changes, 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. Further collaborations with the writer Nick Warburton have included the cantata Train in the Rain for children’s choir, adult choir, keyboards and narrator in summer 2005 and On the Breath of the Sky, a piece for similar forces composed as the centrepiece of Wingbeats in 2007, and evoking the life of the albatross and the threats it faces.

As a musical director, Janet is recognized for her attention to detail in preparing choirs for performance and her well-researched interpretation of a wide spectrum of choral music. She works frequently with various young people’s choral and instrumental groups in the area and in 2004 Janet was awarded a Community Achievement Award by Uttlesford District Council “in recognition of outstanding work for children and young people within the District of Uttlesford”.