Education
Stanford University; Harvard University.
Stanford University; Harvard University.
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, where he teaches presently. 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 Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, 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.
2009"s Tchaikovsky, part of the Master Musicians series published by Oxford University Press, was critically well received.
Michael Church of The Independent wrote, "Presenting life and art as parallel but separate strands, this coolly magisterial book scotches myths, accepts that some mysteries may never be solved, and builds up a picture of this profoundly conflicted man, and his wondrous music, which will probably never be bettered." The Washington Times, in its review, agreed that the book was "perhaps definitive biography" of the composer, although reviewer John M. Taylor did qualify that the dense volume is a "fine book for the specialist, but not necessarily the best choice for your next air flight.".