As a composer, performer and improviser Stevie Wishart explores medieval & contemporary extremes, using ancient technologies such as the hurdygurdy, as well as electronic and computer music technologies of our own time. She has composed for early music ensembles including her own group Sinfonye, and also for orchestral and vocal groups. Sometimes working purely acoustically with music notation, sometimes combined with improvisation, and sometimes using computer music systems. She is currently composing a new work for members of Britten Sinfonia with Random Dance and three Ipswich Schools, as well as finishing a two year project developing an interface with specially commissioned sensors and software for solo violin and computer with a recording at the Institute for Music and Acoustics in the ZKM, Germany.
The medieval music group Sinfonye has released some 12 CDs with the record companies Glossa Music (Spain), Celestial Harmonies (USA), and Hyperion Records (UK) with instrumental and vocal music from medieval repertories as well original compositions and arrangements informed by historical research.
Stevie, with Sinfonye, is also reaching the culmination of her long-term project to record the complete work of Hildegard von Bingen in a 5-6 cd cycle including a multi media performance and contemporary realisation of selected songs.
Stylistic fidelity - with which many early music groups preen themselves - is susceptible to many meanings. Treating written notes as raw material or a starting point is also a defensible philosophy. Stevie Wishart who is known for her medieval ensemble, Sinfonye, as for her improvisatory group Machine for Making Sense - oscillates between the two positions, though her Sydney Festival performance ('concert' seems to formal a term) for the Twilight series veered mostly in the dogma free tradition. Its title was as provocative as it was intriguing, though it can not be denied that improvisation was loved as much by antique musicians as by modern ones. Wishart - using medieval violin,=- and hurdygurdy, plus her voice with a mix of electronics (sampling, delay, synthesised bass tracks) blended old and new seamlessly.
Sydney Festival
John Carmody, The Sunday Telegraph
Stevie Wishart’s performances include those in London’s Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the ICA and the Sydney Opera House. She has performed extensively throughout Europe, in New York, and in Australia and her concerts have been recorded live by BBC Radio 3, Radio France, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF, German Radio Networks, and by Kara Radio Belgium VRT.
New music concerts combine electronic and acoustic instruments, using sensors and virtual instruments, as well as hurdy-gurdy, voice, and violin. She was artist in residence at Mills College, California where she recorded her most recent CD with her trio group with Fred Frith and Carla Kihlstedt. She has also a founder member, along with John Tilbury, of the Violet Quartet that specialises in free improvised music. Violet have appeared recently in Austria and recorded a new CD for release during 2008. Wishart created the film music for Margie Medlin’s DVD installation “Miss World” based upon a computer generated and real dancer for the 2003 Future Cinema exhibition at Zentrum für Media Künst in Karlsruhe (to March 2003) and has won a Sciart Production and Research Award by the Wellcome Trust in collaboration with Cambridge University’s department of Physiology and the ICA, London, to research and create a new live piece “Quartet”, for 2006/7. She presented aspects of her research and performance for Quartet at the 2006 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference on new musical interface design and technology, hosted by IRCAM - Centre Pompidou, in Paris in collaboration with the MINT/OMF of the Sorbonne University and for a solo concert for the Cambridge Festival, UK, and the Homo Futuris presented by the Vooruit Cultural Centre with UNESCO in Belgium. In 2007, she premiered with Sinfonye her new dramatic oratorio The Myth of Europa – an oratorio - “The bisected rim of the horned moon” at the Styriarte Festival in Graz.
Extra-musical activities include working for the British Council with the National Choir of Morocco in Rabat to explore links between Medieval, Moroccan and contemporary improvising and compositional idioms, music consultant to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and most recently as the featured composer for Music Review (BBC Radio World Service), profiling Wishart’s compositions and discussing music culture today.
Recent Composing commissions
(for full catalogue visit STEVIE WISHART CATALOGUE
Europa for the ensemble Sinfonye using theorbo, guitar, organ, hurdy-gurdy and voices for the Styriarte Festival, Graz for June 2007
Quartet for dancer, robot camera, musician and virtual dancer, performed and composed for violin, music sensors and computer instruments, ICA and the Wellcome Trust, London, February 2007
The Sound of Gesture solos for violin, sensors & computer sound transformation/ synthesis (Wishart has directed the development of an audio and gestural interface to control the computer as a violinist). Commissioned for by ZKM|Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie. Germany
Iced for orchestra, Theremin and live electronics commissioned by Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, Belgium and Art Zoyd, Transfrontalier de Productions et de Créations Musicales, France.
La chambre blanche
music for Companie Michele Noiret’s new dance piece, Brussels April 2006Arrow new ensemble piece for counter-tenor, organ, and strings, Augsburg, Pax Festival, Germany, August 2005
Illuminations for string orchestra, for the Ten Tors Orchestra, Plymouth and the Women in Music Festival, Chard
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Date : February 2008
