For this composer, one opera won't do

Scott Wheeler plans to write five - and to draw on the best of musical theater while he's at it

(Wiqan ang for the boston globe)

Two monks wander into a mountain shrine in China. They sit down to rest and begin discussing, naturally, American monetary policy - specifically, the meaning of the gold standard. They can't quite grasp it, but they review all the details, including the various denominations of a dollar and what it means for a currency to have value.

Sound like a curious topic for a mini-opera? Not in the hands of composer Scott Wheeler, who created a setting for two sopranos of this scene from "The Gold Standard" by the poet Kenneth Koch. The vocal lines are gleaming and utterly natural in their contours. A small chamber ensemble delicately tracks the affair, and within a concise eight minutes, the piece moves from charming absurdity to deeply felt meditation. The music brims with wit, freshness of voice, careful craftsmanship, and, in the end, an open-hearted beauty. It is, in other words, typical Scott Wheeler.

This Boston-based composer will lead the local premiere of "The Gold Standard" (this time with tenor and baritone) on Friday as part of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music. At 56, Wheeler is a well-known presence in local new-music circles, having been active in the trenches for decades, most notably as a co-founder of the invaluable ensemble Dinosaur Annex. Yet while he has long enjoyed a steady stream of commissions, Wheeler's composing career has more recently been gaining momentum far outside of his hometown. The conductor Kent Nagano and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester premiered his chamber symphony last year in Berlin; he has received a coveted invitation to prepare a work for the Metropolitan Opera or the Lincoln Center Theatre; he has found an influential supporter in Plácido Domingo, who commissioned his opera "Democracy" for the Washington National Opera; and he has made it his personal goal to write five more operas in the coming years.

It's a hugely ambitious plan but I would not bet against him. In a field where many composers are pigeonholed as audience-pandering neo-Romantics or as egg-headed academicians, Wheeler has found a way to successfully walk the tightrope, writing freshly innovative music that nevertheless addresses itself to a wide audience.

The composer has penned his share of chamber works, many of them quietly haunting, and serious orchestral scores (the chamber symphony "City of Shadows" will receive its American premiere this fall at Indiana University, Bloomington). But Wheeler is the first to admit that his heart, and his most distinctive talent, lies in writing for the stage. "My feeling is that I'm in the tradition of the operatic reformer," he explained over lunch one summer afternoon at his home in North Reading. "Every generation, people come along and say 'You know opera is just drama that's sung - that's what's important about it!' But there are so many other things that we end up focusing on for irrelevant reasons."

Wheeler's own feel for "drama that's sung" has been finely honed in the orchestra pit, conducting, of all things, Broadway musicals. Since the late 1970s, he has taught at Emerson College, where he co-directs the musical theater program and spends many of his days parsing Sondheim or helping singers understand exactly what makes a Cole Porter song tick. There is plenty, Wheeler thinks, that an opera composer can learn from the Broadway stage tradition. "To me the great thing to gain from these works is their clarity of dramatic timing and their economy of musical means," he says. "It's the timing, it's the rhyming, it's the wit that keeps them in the world of entertainment. And we could use more of that in the world of opera."

On a more basic level, Wheeler's work in musical theater has also given him the practical, sleeves-rolled-up experience of the dramatic stage that he finds invaluable in his own compositional process. "In order to write an opera, I imagine myself right there in the pit with a big audience in back of me, a stage full of singers, and an orchestra in front of me," he explains. "Because I've had that experience with musicals for so many years, I have the sense of how the music is driving the whole show, working with the lights and the sets, with the stage movement, and above all, with the singers, the voices and the words they're singing."

For such a theatrically oriented composer, Wheeler comes across in person as rather soft-spoken. His two big indulgences in life, he confesses, are imported tea and competitive tennis. ("It's in my music," he once said, "that I put on funny hats.") He was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up mostly in the suburbs of New York City. He studied piano as a kid and played in a soul band but never considered a career in composing until midway through his undergraduate days at Amherst College. The composer Lewis Spratlan was his teacher then, and has followed his career closely through the years.

"I remember vividly a very early encounter with him," recalled Spratlan by phone from Amherst. "He was the pianist in a wonderful performance of the Debussy Cello Sonata, and I knew right there that this was a big-time musician. And then as soon as he began composing, one sensed that this was it. This was something he was meant to do."

Wheeler continued his studies at New England Conservatory and at Brandeis University. While still in school, he also met the urbane composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Wheeler still remembers the excitement of conducting a production of Thomson's opera "The Mother of Us All" at Emerson, with the composer present. "I asked Virgil, 'How do you do this words-and-music stuff?' He said, 'Oh, come to New York and I'll tell you. I got all the recipes and they don't teach them in the music schools.' "

So Wheeler went on to study privately with Thomson, and later dedicated his first major stage-work, "The Construction of Boston," to his teacher. Premiered in 1989, it's a wonderfully imaginative, smartly whimsical one-act opera/oratorio about the mythical birth of the city of Boston. It's based on a text that Kenneth Koch wrote in the 1960s as a performance piece for the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle, and all three actually appear in the work as characters endowed with godlike powers. The score is bright-hued and richly melodic, with a plainspoken feel that nevertheless manages to keep the ear engaged and avoid clichés.

Donald Teeters and the Boston Cecilia chorus have made a first-rate live recording of the work that was released this year on Naxos, with a fine cast of soloists. Listening to the piece, what comes across almost immediately is Wheeler's knack for transparent, elegant vocal writing, something that has also endeared his work to the singers who perform it. "It's the first thing that struck me when I was learning 'Construction of Boston,' " said Krista River, a soloist on the recording. "He sets text extremely well and just writes beautiful melodies, which we don't always get with new music."

Wheeler's second major stage work - and his first full-length opera - is "Democracy: An American Comedy," a tale of romance, power, and greed set in the nation's capital during the Grant administration, with a libretto by Romulus Linney inspired by the novels of Henry Adams. It was commissioned by Domingo's Washington National Opera and its 2005 premiere was well-received. According to Wheeler, Opera Boston is considering mounting a new local production of the work in 2010.

And then, there's the Met/Lincoln Center Theater commission, which, for various administrative reasons, has barely gotten off the ground. For the libretto, Wheeler has chosen another play by Linney, this one about Frederick the Great of Prussia, but no music has been written. It's just one of the five additional operas Wheeler hopes to compose. Each one he says will take about two years to actually write.

In his spare time, Wheeler keeps a close eye on the field, not just on what his colleagues are up to but, even more importantly, what the next wave of emerging composers is doing. He tracks down their work and funnels it to Dinosaur Annex or to Teeters at Boston Cecelia, where he is composer in residence. "It's unique in my experience for a composer to be such a musical omnivore," says Teeters. "He seems to know everything that's going on and he's prepared to appreciate everything that's going on."

Still, there is a vast distance between, say, the microtonal music of Ezra Sims (which Wheeler will also be conducting on Friday's Ditson Festival program) and "Oklahoma!" Does the composer find it difficult to travel authentically between his two worlds? Quite the opposite, he explains. He sees his dual-citizenship as essential to his own approach to opera: "My opera impulse is partly an impulse to connect those two things, to use many of the same ideas that have been rolling around in my head from the work I conduct with Dinosaur Annex, and the vibrant theatrical life that I feel in musical theater. If there's one place I exist as an opera composer, that's it."

He adds, "I feel that my best work happens when I try to [live in both places] at the same time. That is, I want to think of the most radical and uncompromising musical statement of whatever is on my mind - or in the text in front of me - and at the same time, the most full and open-hearted way to reach out to the largest possible audience."

It's an approach that is clearly bearing fruit. Just five more operas to go. Or as he's quick to admit, after more than three decades of writing music, "I feel like I'm just getting started."

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.