Phillip Wilcher
| Phillip Wilcher | |
|---|---|
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Phillip Leslie Wilcher |
| Born |
16 March 1958 Camperdown, New South Wales, Australia |
| Genres | Classical |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, actor |
| Instruments | Piano, Trumpet |
| Years active | 1972–present |
| Labels | Wirripang |
| Website | phillipwilcher |
Phillip Leslie Wilcher (born 16 March 1958) is an Australian pianist and classical music composer who was a founding member of the children's music group The Wiggles. When Wilcher published his first work, "Daybreak", at the age of 14, he was one of the youngest classical composers in Australia.
Wilcher has published over 100 piano-related works and has performed both solo and with ensembles. Rita Crews for The Studio Quarterly Magazine described his style as "free-flowing, with an underlying romantic character, one in which melodic line and lyricism are all-important elements". His music has been broadcast by radio stations ABC-FM and 2MBS-FM – the latter has aired two documentaries, Wilcher and the French Connection and Wilcher's World.
Phillip Leslie Wilcher was born on 16 March 1958 to Naomi Joy Thompson (8 April 1929 – 21 June 2005) and Leslie James Wilcher (born 16 January 1923), a World War II veteran. Wilcher grew up in Camperdown. As of 2004, he resided in Concord and owns no cell phone, watch, computer, or car: "My entire life since I was a boy was writing music and that has overshadowed everything. I would be happy living in an oversized cardboard box with a piano and a blank sheet of manuscript paper".
Wilcher started piano lessons at the age of eight; his first teachers were Gladys Woodward and Jean Teasel. His interest in composing music began at an early age, before his teens. At the age of 14, Wilcher published his first piano composition, "Daybreak", with the Sydney-based music company, J. Albert & Son, making him the then-youngest published composer in Australia. The track was later recorded by Leslie Ritter and Scott Petito (The Fugs) on their album, Circles in Sand (2001), and re-recorded in 2006 by John Martin on his CD, Ancient Rivers.
For seven years, after he published "Daybreak", Wilcher was a student of composer and musicologist, Franz Holford, who was an editor at J. Albert & Son; he later composed music with Holford for over twenty years. Wilcher's piano piece, "Autumn Rain", was published when he was 17, by J. Albert & Son. He also studied with classical musicians Neta Maughan and Elpis Liossatos, and began a thirty-year association with composer Miriam Hyde. In 1976 Wilcher became an assistant editor for J. Albert & Son's Classical/Educational Division. During the 1980s he worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
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