Exploring music’s unique ability to express ideas on a level which transcends other routes of communication is what motivates Stevie’s work as a music composer and improviser.
Educated at the University of York, the University of Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music and studying informally with John Cage in Edinburgh, Stevie’s early career was playing with leading free jazz improvisers in London, Berlin, New York and with Machine for Making Sense in Australia, while also launching her own medieval music ensemble Sinfonye which won the MAfestival competition in Brugge. She has taught composition for the Dartington international summer school, and also had a visiting fellowship in composition at the University of Cambridge, as well as being a judge for the Brugge and York early music festivals, and for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s composer awards.
She has performed and had her compositions played at major venues including the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Festival Hall in London, the Sydney Opera House and St Peter’s Basilica Rome. She has recorded for Decca, Hyperion, Glossa records and Splitrec as well as for her own and other indie labels. More recently she has collaborated with Alice Oswald (Oxford Professor of Poetry), composed for the Hermes Experiment at The Barbican, the pianist Joanna MacGregor, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and for the contemporary music Ensemble Variances directed by Thierry Pecou with whom she had a Residency at Britten Pears Arts in Snape, Aldeburgh.
Concern for the environment is a natural extension of Wishart’s creativity: she is a member of Fo.am and a founder member of the Ecotones Network with whom she conducted workshops listening to trees and performed with Hakoto at the 2023 Timber Festival. Endangered birdsong is heard as themes in recent orchestral, chamber and vocal works, and her future commission for the Ipswich Choral Society (2025) for whom she is honorary vice-president, is inspired by the subtleties in the sound of different types of leaves.
Dedicated to composing, she only occasionally gives concerts such as at Wintersound in Canterbury and the First Light Festival in Lowestoft and at EA Sustain (May 2024). She is a violinist who also performs on the hurdy-gurdy, a stringed keyboard instrument going back to medieval times, its strings sounded by the rim of a wheel. This instrument gives a unique ‘old-and-new’ sound, which resonates in Stevie’s music cutting a sonic groove between spontaneous improvisation and carefully crafted composition.