Stevie Wishart is a contemporary music composer and performer who aims to make us more aware of our relationships with nature. Stevie uses ambient sound relationships as a means to create a musical score.
Exploring music’s unique ability to express ideas on a level which transcends other routes of communication is what motivates Stevie Wishart’ s work as a music composer and improviser.
Concern for the environment is a natural extension of Wishart’s creativity.: she is a member of Fo.am (an international network for creating sustainable futures).
Birds and Trees
Much of Stevie Wishart ’s work in the last few years has been with and about birds, however trees have also been a consistent focus. Stevie is a founder member and the composer for a network research project called “Ecotones – soundscapes with trees”. This has won an ESRC award directed by Prof Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University) which includes partners and speakers such as Won Sop Shin, Professor of Social Forestry at Chungbuk University and President of the Society of Nature and Forest Medicine in South Korea, biologist and tree author David Haskell and Forest Research (research agency of the Forestry Commission). For the Ecotones Network Stevie has conducted workshops listening to trees and performed with Hakoto at the 2023 Timber Festival.
Performances and compositions
Stevie Wishart 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.
From medieval music to contemporary composition
Stevie Wishart has a wide range of experience from historical to contemporary music. Refusing to be limited by any one genre or skill, her training began academically at the University of York, the University of Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music. The hurdy gurdy and the violin became her specialist instruments, and having specialised in medieval music she went on to study contemporary composition informally with John Cage in Edinburgh.
Stevie’s early career was spent playing with leading free jazz improvisers in London, Berlin, New York and with Machine for Making Sense in Australia. She also launched her own medieval music ensemble Sinfonye which won the MAfestival competition in Brugge.
Stevie Wishart 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.
Greenland Music
Stevie Wishart has performed for a Norfolk & Norwich Festival event, Sensing Trees at GroundWork Gallery and since 2025, has been a neighbour in King’s Lynn where she stays when she is not touring. She is establishing a new iniative in King’s Lynn, Greenland Music, based in her remarkable historic building Greenland Fishery. Here she plans to run compostion residencies, colloquia and small music events specially aimed at other composers and musicians interested in connections between music, nature and the environment.
