Stevie Wishart
Monday 27 July 2020
“Stevie Wishart’s Eurostar: A journey in sound between cities (2016), the evening’s most experimental work, explored improvisation using vocalise, with whooshes, whines and a whole variety of modern loco impressions: motion in poetry.” The Guardian
Stevie Wishart is a composer, performer and improviser. She explores medieval and contemporary extremes, using voices, ancient technologies such as the hurdy gurdy, and electronic music technologies of our own time.
Stevie’s music explores medieval and contemporary extremes, using voices, ancient technologies such as the hurdy-gurdy, and emerging technologies of today. She studied composition at York University with Trevor Wishart, improvised and aleatoric music with John Cage in Edinburgh, postgraduate studies in early music (violin and voice) at the Guildhall, London and with a Vicente Cañada Blanch JRF at New College, University of Oxford, and through many collaboration.
She has composed for modern orchestras and vocal groups and for her own group, Sinfonye. As a composer she works acoustically with music notation, sometimes combined with improvisation, sometimes using computer music systems, and sometimes using all these elements.
The challenge of creating music for a wide range of contexts is important, such as composing for productions by Michèle Noiret (Théâtre National de Bruxelles) and Wayne McGregor, a large-scale choral work for a Proms commission with the BBC Singers & Sinfonye, and for the designer Philippe Starck. With the support of a Visiting Music Fellowship at the University of Cambridge she is currently composing a Double-Bass Concerto for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London.
Exploring music’s unique ability to express new ideas on a level which transcends other routes of communication motivates her work as a composer (and improviser).
Stevie Wishart studied composition and electronic music at the University of York with Trevor Wishart and Richard Orton, as well as improvised and aleatoric music with John Cage and David Tudor in Edinburgh. She continued postgraduate performance studies in early music (baroque violin and voice) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (Diploma in Advanced Performance) and with a Nuffield Foundation award and a Vicente Cañada Blanch Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford (Degree of MLitt) for research into medieval musical iconography.
Invited for a number of composer residences and fellowships, she has presented her work at IRCAM in Paris; the Institute for Music and Acoustics in the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany; the ADK, Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, and Mills College in California. She received a Wellcome Trust award to develop her compositions using musical gestures and sound-to-control computers, and to work at the University of Cambridge with the neuroscientist Ian Winter on audio processes based on the physiology of the ear.
She is currently a Visiting Music Fellow at the University of Cambridge with the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP).
Stevie Wishart’s Cantata for the Seasons was given its world premiere at Snape Maltings in April 2014. Other major projects include a Concerto Grosso, a double bass concerto, commissioned for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which premiered at London’s Southbank Centre, a solo piece for piano for Joanna MacGregor, a choral piece for Ex Cathedra, and a new piece for the Dunedin Consort for the 2019 BBC Proms.
