Michael was born in Long Island, NY, to author, columnist, economist, Presidential adviser and lobbyist Richard J. Whalen and art dealer and author Joan M. Whalen. The family moved to Washington, DC when he was two years old. Whalen started playing the piano at the age of three, and began formal lessons on drums when he was five. Influenced by rock, progressive music, early "ambient" music and fusion, he experimented with many different styles of music into his teens. In the summer of 1980, Whalen found himself playing percussion with the Maryland all-state orchestra, second keyboards in a well known Washington "Go-Go" band, and drums in a garage-style punk band. In the fall of 1980, he went to boarding school for high school at St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware. During high school, Whalen wrote his first music, switched his primary instrument from percussion to keyboards, and made his first studio recordings and first self produced recordings on a cassette 4-track machine. In 1982, he produced and released his first "single" with singer/songwriter and guitarist Jim Steed. In May 1987, Whalen attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Maryland/College Park and moved to New York City. After recording hundreds of tracks in his 8-track basement studio and throughout the Washington-metro area, Whalen moved to New York City.
Career
Michael's first job was working at Elias Associates as an assistant. Elias was one of the busiest music production companies in the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and Whalen immersed himself in the state-of-the-art technology available in the studios at Elias at night. Their studios featured the Synclavier Digital Audio System which became a huge part of Whalen's later career. It was at Elias that Whalen did his first sound design and composition of national advertisements. He also had an opportunity to work with recording artists Duran Duran, John Waite and Glamour Camp as assistant, programmer and sound designer. Working for many of the top music companies, Whalen did many hundreds of commercials from 1989 to 1995. In 1990, Michael scored his first major television series entitled "Childhood" which was broadcast on PBS in the United States. This was the first of nearly 70 multi-part series he has composed music for and the first of the nearly 600-plus television shows he has worked on. In 1995, Whalen opened his own music production company, Michael Whalen Music, LTD. During these years, Whalen scored dozens of films for National Geographic, Discovery, The History Channel, ESPN, PBS and many others. In 1997, he won his first Emmy award for his work on HBO's "How Do You Spell God?" In 1998, Whalen wrote the theme for ABC News' "Good Morning America". In 1998, he moved to the suburbs of Boston where he built a new studio in his attic.
2000 to present
In 2002, Whalen was an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He completed work on the soundtrack for the film Veronika Decides to Die starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in 2008. While living in New York City, he was appointed as an adjunct lecturer at City College of New York in January 2009. Also in 2009, Whalen became an adjunct professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University in June 2009. The piano solo "My Linda," from his album Dancing In Black & White, provided the introductory music for all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time as recorded by Simon Vance for Audible Modern Vanguard. In 2009, Whalen released his first EP featuring him as a vocalist, titled "The Road of Ghosts." In 2017, Whalen produced "Tiny Hands", a protest song written for the Inauguration of Donald Trump and the Women's March on Washington and performed by Fiona Apple.
Discography
Mysterious Ways 2001
Songs Without Words: A Windham Hill Collection 1997
