About

Will Wheeler is a guitarist, fiddler, and dancer playing traditional music from around the world. He was first captivated by traditional music at the northern California Renaissance Faire, featuring performers from a variety of traditions. This led him to Lark Camp in the early 2000s, where he dove deep into the music that made those Renaissance Faire performances come alive. Since then, with no formal training, he's learned the way many traditional musicians do — by sitting in sessions, attending dances, and learning directly from other players, absorbing the rhythms and vocabularies of Irish, Quebecoise, Breton, English, Swedish, and more. His foot percussion draws from the podorythmie tradition — the rhythmic tapping of the feet common to Quebecoise and contra dance music — adding another layer to his ensemble work.

What guides his playing is this: learn what makes a tradition sound like itself. Understand its characteristic phrasing, its rhythmic feel, its particular beauty. Then learn to be creative and expressive within those boundaries. Contra dance music, in particular, provides freedom — a space where he can weave together all the knowledge he's gathered from many traditions and use it to create especially dynamic and nuanced music.

Will's musical home is the dance floor. Whether playing a Scottish reel, an Irish jig, a Quebecoise tune, or an original contra dance tune, his focus is on the music that makes people move — and on the community that gathers around it.

He is the Artistic Director of Lark Camp, an annual week-long gathering in Mendocino that celebrates folk music and dance traditions from every corner of the globe, and serves on the committee that runs the Monday Night Irish Ceili at the Starry Plough pub in Berkeley.