Stevie Wishart & Sinfonye

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Stevie Wishart & Sinfonye · Stevie Wishart is a composer, improviser and performer on the hurdy-gurdy and the violin. She studied at Cambridge, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music and took lessons in composition and electronic music at York. Later she studied improvisation and aleatoric music with John Cage and David Tudor. She works mainly in contemporary music, but also built a career in early music.

Music and breakthrough

With her ensemble Sinfonye she plays repertoire of the medieval troubadours and trouvères and from the Cantigas de Santa Maria. She also edited and recorded the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen. Her recordings have appeared on Decca Records, Hyperion and Glossa, among others. In this way she belongs to the musicians who bring medieval songs back to life with a sound of their own and plenty of imagination, rather than performing them as museum pieces.

Influence

In her own compositions Wishart searches for what music can express that other forms of communication cannot reach. She wrote for dance, theatre and choirs, and her work has been performed at, among other places, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and at the BBC Proms. Nature and the environment play a large role: in recent works she regularly uses the sounds of endangered species as a theme. In School of Rock she appears as the performer of a song by Bernart de Ventadorn, a twelfth-century troubadour.

Listening

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  Can vei la lauzeta mover (Bernart de Ventadorn) · Stevie Wishart & Sinfonye, 1170