Photo © Paul Kolnik

Roland John Wiley was born in California, raised in Nevada, and earned his undergraduate degree in music from Stanford University with departmental honors in choral conducting. Then followed a term of military service and graduate study in musicology at Harvard University, where he took the doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan that year. His research interests are Russian music and ballet; his current projects are a life and works of Tchaikovsky and a study of the choreographer Marius Petipa. His books include Tchaikovsky's Ballets (1985), A Century of Russian Ballet (1990), and The Life and Ballets of Lev Ivanov, Choreographer of 'The Nutcracker' and 'Swan Lake' (1997) for which he was awarded the de la Torre Bueno Prize. With Malcolm Hamrick Brown he edited Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham (1985). His editions include Two Essays on Stepanov Dance Notation by Alexander Gorsky (1978) and Charles-Louis Didelot, Three King's Theatre Ballets, 1796-1801 (1994). He wrote the entry on 'Tchaikovsky' for the latest edition of The New Grove Dictionary. He has received grants from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, which, in conjunction with the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), sponsored four research visits to Russia and the former Soviet Union. Dr. Wiley has served as production consultant for revivals of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker by the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and has made translations for that theatre, the Edinburgh Festival, and the Dallas Opera.