Stevie Wishart: Drehleier, Violine
 

Die britische Komponistin und Musikerin Stevie Wishart entführt uns auf eine Zeitreise, in der sie Brücken zwischen der Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart schlägt. Auf ihrer Drehleier interpretiert sie ein Estampie aus dem 14. Jahrhundert und stellt dieser mittelalterlichen Musik ein eigenes Werk gegenüber. Am Schluss kehrt sie mit einem neuen Stück für Violine und Elektronik ganz in die Gegenwart zurück.
 
PROGRAMM
Anonymous: Belicha (14. Jhdt) for hurdy-gurdy
Stevie Wishart: Solos for fingers, strings and a wheel (2008) for hurdy-gurdy
Stevie Wishart: Frozen Particles (2010) for violin and tape
 
In an early Reniassance music manuscript probably coming from Tuscany and now owned by the British Museum, there are a series of intriguing and unique monophonc instrumental melodies, which weave their way through extended, florrid melodic patterns while being cleverly structured around the musical form from which the pieces take their title: istampite.
 
These istampite are little gems - rare vestiges of a long lost musical tradition - and particularly interesting for us today because they were probably written-out improvisations. It was already very rare for scribes to notate instrumental music, and the fact that this was also of an improvisation nature, therefore makes it even more special. In much the same way as Bach's suites took their formal cue from dance genres, the istampite may also have been a dance form, from which fully developed instrumental pieces developed in their own right. As with all of the handful of instrumental pieces which survive from the medieval and eary Reniassance periods - there is no indication of what instrument the istampite should be played on, but bowed instruments would have been the most likely choice, tuned according to medieval tunings with intermittent drones to support the long, meandering melodies.
 
Wishart will then continue her program with her own compositions for hurdy-gurdy which she calls "solos for fingers, strings and a wheel". In these pieces she responds to the medieval structure of the hurdy-gurdy, with its wierd and wonderful technology which guide the sounds and ideas of these pieces.
 
Finally we come full circle and return to the present, with another kind of bowed instruments, the much more familiar violin. Wishart's violin playing is very much influenced by both the hurdy-gurdy and medeival violin, as can be heard in the final piece called "Frozen Particles" for solo violin & sound-track. The sound-track is entirely made up of transformations of the violin part, which were processed through the computer as part of the compositional and improvisational process and recorded ("frozen") in real time. This is from Wishart's latest CD/DVD "The Sound of Gesture".

 

BIOGRAFIE
Stevie Wishart was educated at Cambridge, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, studying composition and electronic music at the University of York with Trevor Wishart and Richard Orten. She then studied improvised and aleatoric music with John Cage and David Tudor. As a composer, performer and improviser Stevie explores medieval & contemporary extremes, using ancient technologies such as the hurdy-gurdy, as well as electronic and computer music technologies of our own time. She has composed for early and modern music ensembles, including her own group Sinfonye.
 Stevie has appeared throughout Europe, USA and Australia in venues ranging from The Wigmore Hall, to the ICA and the Sydney Opera House. She has had residencies and fellowships at ircam, Paris; ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Akademie der Künste, Berlin and Mills College, California. She played a major role in the Southbank’s ‘Take the Risk’ festival of early and improved music. Stevie has written much for dance and has worked with Margie Medlin, Michèle Noiret and Wayne McGregor, and worked with other creative artists such as designer Philippe Starck. As an improvisor, she performs with artists such as John Tilbury and Fred Frith.
 
The Sound of Gesture, a project developing an interface with specially commissioned sensors and software for solo violin and computer has been presented live and in gallery installations and was released on CD/DDV in July 2010.
 
Stevie Wishart is based in Brussels and currently working on BBC commission for the BBC Singers and a number of projects reflecting a passion for finding compositional inspiration in political and environmental issues.