Wiley, Roland John, 1942-

Roland John Wiley (1942-) is an American musicologist, instructor and consultant whose main area of focus is on 19th-century Russian music and ballet. He has written a biography and critical study on the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and contributed the entry on the composer in the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. His current project is a study of choreographer Marius Petipa. A California native, Wiley was raised in Nevada before returning to California to attend Stanford University. A music major, he earned a Bachelor of Arts with departmental honors in choral conducting. He entered Harvard University in Massachusetts after a tour of military service. His dissertation at Harvard focused on Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, and he earned a Doctorate in 1974. Later that year he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. Wiley, dubbed "ballet's super sleuth" in 1984 by Boston Globe, was consulted by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London for the Royal Ballet's revivals of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. He has also done translation work for that theater, the Edinburgh Festival and the Dallas Opera. His research has taken him four times to Russia and the former USSR, under grant by the American Council of Learned Societies and in conjunction with the International Research and Exchanges Board. He has received other grants from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wiley has published several books on Tchaikovsky, his colleagues and his work. Among them, 1997's The Life and Ballets of Lev Ivanov: Choreographer of 'The Nutcracker' and 'Swan Lake,' published through Oxford University Press, took the de la Torre Bueno Prize in 1998 for the best book in dance. 2009's Tchaikovsky, part of the Master Musicians series published by Oxford University Press, was critically well received.