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Stevie Wishart

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

Stevie Wishart is a composer, improviser and performer on the hurdy-gurdy and the violin. She works mainly in contemporary music, but also has a career in early music. She edited and recorded the complete works of Hildegard of Bingen, and with her ensemble Sinfonye she plays music by medieval troubadours and trouvères and from the Cantigas de Santa Maria. She studied at Cambridge, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, and then composition and electronic music at the University of York. With John Cage and David Tudor she studied improvised and aleatoric music.

Music and breakthrough

Wishart's work explores how music can express ideas that other forms of communication cannot reach. She made music for productions by Michèle Noiret and Wayne McGregor, for the designer Philippe Starck and for the BBC Proms, where the BBC Singers and Sinfonye performed her choral work Out of this World in 2011. She also wrote Rough with the Smooth, a concerto for double bass, in 2015, and the cantata The Seasons in 2014. She has performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Sydney Opera House and St Peter's Basilica, and has recorded for Decca, Hyperion and Glossa.

Influence

Concern for the environment runs like a thread through her work. She is a member of the art-science network Fo.am and co-founder of the Ecotones Network. In her recent orchestral, chamber and vocal works she often uses the sounds of endangered species as a theme. In this way she connects an old instrument such as the hurdy-gurdy with the newest music and with the nature of today.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a recording of Wishart on hurdy-gurdy, for example from Hildegard. Notice the buzzing, continuous drone beneath the melody, which gives a medieval atmosphere.

Discography

Studio albums

Categories: Artists