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. 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.
Education and academic work
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.
