Latest News
Megastructures - New Album 11/21/2023
I am pleased to announce the release of my latest piano/electronic concoction! You can find Megastructures wherever fine music is streamed (Amazon music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc), but you can only find the full liner notes right here on my website!
This album features massively multilayered improvisations, including seven examples of a form I call ‘hypercanons’ because they include so many iterations of the original improvisation.
Experience an interstellar musical voyage away from Earth to. the edges of all that is known, unlike anything you've ever heard from me. Yes, at times there are things inside the piano that probably shouldn't be, but it also has:
Massive constellations of sound...
Hypercanons with up to sixty voices...
Harmonic webs tangling across the entire piano...
The piano's sound transformed into cosmic vastness...
Shifting metric engines propelling the music far into space...
...and also one really pleasant, simple interlude titled "Hold Me as the Light Fades" (in case you aren't up for the interstellar voyage of the entire album).
THE INFINITE WELL
The Infinite Well is a new recording series documenting my improvisation sessions at the piano.
Improvisation plays an important role for me as a composer, helping me discover new ideas and sounds I would not invent if going straight to writing notes on the page. Improvising helps me break through writing blocks because there is this creative headspace I find when I play, where I can trust that there is always that next sound, that next idea, that next inspiration. Author Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) calls this "trusting the soup." I think of it as drawing upon the infinite well that never runs dry.
Here's to the act of spontaneous creation, the exploration of musical intuition, the practice of sonic meditation and the joy of sharing new music!
Hymns for Christmas and the New Year
This Winter I’ve put together a free collection of 19 of my Christmas/Winter/New Years hymns. You can download it here!
HYMNS
For years, composing hymns has been one of my most consistent compositional outputs. There is something about finding a good text that just sends melodies straight into my brain. And the process of harmonizing them in my own way is one of my favorite parts of the process. With over 150 completed hymns, it may be time to put together my very own hymnal! In the meantime, please enjoy the recordings (and sheet music) available for many of my hymns on the Hymns page of my site
Open for Commissions
Any piece listed in the Music page of my site is currently available for performance by professional musicians (with notice) for FREE. Please see Connect page for contact information.
I also accept commissions for any ensemble at the standard rates, again please contact me to work out details.
"LET YOUR WATCHWORD BE ORDER AND YOUR BEACON BEAUTY."
How do These words of architect Daniel Burnham apply to music?
I SEE A PARADOX in the interplay of beauty and order, when applied to sound, a fascinating mystery that arises when you take the idea to a 21st century extreme. Can each moment of music be fantastically beautiful and utterly unique...and yet also be beautiful because of its place, its function, its relationship to the sounds before and after?
I would tell you that I am a composer of metamodern music...but then I would have to try explain what in the world that means. Labels can only get you so far anyway.
Music connects people in a way that transcends borders, backgrounds, languages—even words themselves. As a composer, this soul-connection is WHY I make music.
I don't think you have to understand the style or the musical language for the music to do its thing. You just have to listen intently. Listen in a way my earbuds-in, neverending-streaming-playlist generation often forgets to—with your full attention. After one performance of my man-vs-piano opus Map of Trees, during which the audience watched and listened spellbound (horrorstruck?) as I played the piano in all sorts of verboten ways in an otherwise quiet library, a stranger told me:
“I’ve never heard anything like your music! I have no idea how to explain what you were doing to the piano or how it works musically—but I feel like I GOT it in a way I can’t describe in words...”
Only my music can really speak for itself, because if you force me to the wall to describe it, you'll get something true but opaquely prolix, like the following:
I compose the music of 'and.' In my music I seek a balance between complexity and accessibility, between the unique beauty of individual moments and the interrelated intricacy of formal structures. My music is powered by the dynamo of dichotomies and paradoxes—monolith and labyrinth, cohesive and fragmentary, the ancient and the digital, the city and the jungle. I savor the effects of sound on both the physical and spiritual senses. In my music, melodic intimacy is contrasted with swirling masses of sound; improvisation coexists with rigorous systems. My music is traditional, wrapped in the avant-garde, oscillating inside a distinctly twenty-first century 'in-between,' 'and' or 'metaxy'. Vermeulen and van den Akker describe this metamodern 'and' state as "a pendulum swinging between...innumerable poles." As a composer I am aiming to "transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity" (Moyo).
tl;dr—I may be educated but that hasn't bred the life out of my music.
And: My music is not just one thing, it is 'all the things.'
listen responsibly.
short bio
A composer whose beacon is beauty and whose watchword is order; who believes that the best music has not yet been written and that music should be poetry for things that words fail to express, crafting a balance between complexity and accessibility. Officially a Doctor (of Musical Arts) as of May 2017. Current visiting professor at Brigham Young University–Idaho in Rexburg, Idaho. Successful Kickstarter project creator (KarelianSounscapes.org).
curriculum vitae
contact
OKAY, SO...WHAT DOES THE R. STAND FOR?
R. is for Robert, but my dad is Robert and so I've always been Michael except on paperwork. Can't have the folks on ratemyprofessor.com confusing me with my chili pepper-rated father! I'm R. Michael Wahlquist to avoid online confusion with a Mike Wahlquist who works for the postal service, and honestly just because it looks grand on a musical score.
INFLUENCES AND BACKGROUND—I.E. GOD (AND THE INTERNET) MADE ME
Raised in rural towns in the Mountain West, I was exposed to two of my most important influences—modern music and Slavic culture—only thanks to the advent of home Internet. Online I found inspirations and influences that would have been much less open to the small-town kid of any other era—Slavic music and culture, avant-garde classical music, obscure science fiction, eclectic modern visual art and guilty-pleasure indie hipster music.
As an active Christian and Latter-day Saint, my idiosyncratic music is infused with a vibrant spirituality particularly notable in a growing body of hymn tunes (120+) and in the titles and inspirations for many of my instrumental works.
My late grandpa Charles P. Wahlquist once told me that if I wanted to really make a difference, I should be a teacher. I realized that to be the composer and teacher I want to be, I would need to get all the education I could. Education has been an important priority me—I earned a Bachelor of Musical Arts degree from Brigham Young University-Idaho (2009) in Jazz Studies (Piano) with a minor in Russian; and a Master of Music degree from Brigham Young University (2013) in composition, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition at Arizona State University (2017). I worked as a part-time theory/dictation teaching assistant during my graduate studies starting in 2010.
Since fall 2019 I have been living in Rexburg, Idaho where I am a visiting professor of music (theory and composition) at Brigham Young University–Idaho’s Department of Music. From 2016-2019 I worked as a full-time Music Lecturer at Texas A&M University–Kingsville. My angel wife Qait (her way of spelling Kate) is a professional harpist. Together we have three children—Ender, Scarlett and Nikolas. It's not hyperbole to say that the greatest joy I know in life is in these family ties!
I have continued to study music and Russian culture in college. From 2004-2006 I served as an LDS missionary in the Russia St. Petersburg Mission, including time in the cities of St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Petrozavodsk and Pskov. I'm fluent in Russian as a second language. My professional ties and involvement in Russian culture were strengthened by the recent Karelian Soundscapes project and ongoing research into Russian composers and musical traditions.