William Hedley was born in Wigan in 1952. He studied composition
with Stephen Dodgson at the Royal College of Music, but his career
took a different turn when he took a part-time post teaching music
in a comprehensive school in Hackney. The next fifteen years were
spent working in different schools in and around London, before
he began to realise that music in secondary schools was moving
in a direction whose aims he no longer shared. He moved to Southwest
France in 1989, where he now earns his living teaching music and
conducting choirs.
William is an active ambassador for British music, programming
British composers with the choirs he conducts whenever possible.
He was introduced to the music of Benjamin Britten by his grammar
school music teacher and his passion for that composer's music
has never waned. In recent years a profound admiration for and
love of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams has been added to
this. He is also particularly keen on French music as well as
music from the Nordic and Baltic countries. Choral music is, of
course, important to him, as is opera. In general, music written
after 1900 is more likely to fire his enthusiasm than music written
before, but pressed to name the pinnacle of the repertoire it
would probably be Mozart's Figaro, and he believes Siegfried's
Funeral March from Götterdämmerung to be the finest
single passage of music ever composed.
William is a trustee of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society. Since
2005, he is the editor of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal.