Stevie Wishart

Stevie Wishart is a multi-faceted musician/composer active in improvised and experimental music, and multi-media performances, and distinguished in medieval classical music. She studied at the University of York and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and periodically works on a D.Phil on medieval bowed instruments at Oxford University on a Vicente Canada Blanch Fellowship. Wishart has also studied archaic music traditions during her travels, learning from the Occitan singers of Southern France, the balladists and kemancha players of the Thar Desert (Rajastan), and Cantabria, Spain's rabel musicians. In 1986, Wishart founded Sinfonye, a group which researched the performance practices of traditional musics to use in their own combining of medeival and improvisatory musics. Although she was still active in Sinfonye throughout the '90s, Wishart had numerous other projects going. Some of her accomplishments in medieval music include her reconstruction for a 1992 Utrecht world premiere of Dom Dinis of Portugal's "Cantigas de Amor," and her multi-media presentation of Hildegard von Bingen's "Symphony of Celestial Revelations" for several festivals and a BBC Radio broadcast that same year. Wishart has collaborated with the Machine for Making Sense (a music-text group), and an octet of European women improvisers whose discussions became a feature on Switzerland's Radio DRS. Wishart has also composed and performed her own music, including a piece entitled "the Square of Infinity." This dance-music work had its premiere performance — which included Wishart — in Lake Mungo's dry bed (New South Wales, Australia), with a follow-up performance in Sydney. Later, Wishart composed a piece that draws on improvisational, medieval and techno styles for an ACGB commission. The resulting work, "Lacunae," premiered in London just before Wishart embarked on a two week European tour. Her work in experimental music and performance includes her contribution to the Haikus Urbains compilation (which also includes Otomo Yoshihide, Fred Frith, Luc and Andy Ex and more) and her involvement in the 1998 Australian multimedia ballet, Urge. Wishart recorded the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen for the Celestial Harmonies label, and several albums for the Hyperion label before signing with Glossa.