Trevor Wishart
Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. He was educated at the University of Oxford (BA 1968), the University of Nottingham (MA 1969), and the University of York (PhD 1973).
Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. He was educated at the University of Oxford (BA 1968), the University of Nottingham (MA 1969), and the University of York (PhD 1973).
Menagerie - Beach singularity - Vocalise
Releasing electroacoustic music in this country has historically, always been a dedicated persuit. With no national record labels and very few electronic music studios to support this music, the UK has always lagged behind its counterparts in both the United States and throughout east and west Europe. Trevor Wishart started releasing his own music in 1973 and continues to do so to this day. Much of this LP was originally privately released in 1979. Whilst other maverick British composers (Nyman,…
Fabulous Paris
* 2021 Stock * An excellent release of classic Trevor Wishart material. Fabulous Paris was commissioned by Swedish Radio, Malmö, and the Birmingham Rumours Festival. This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live, through the medium of the human voice. CD release includes extensive liner notes on the 3 pieces.
The Garden of Earthly
**In process of stocking** A new release from Trevor Wishart, inspired by the Bosch painting of the same name. He describes this as a comic opera. It was conceived as a 8-channel audio piece, in which voices are heard in several different audio environments, and where the words they use and the environmental context all metamorphose each time they return It is extremely dense using the voices of the characters as starting points for complex digital manipulation. Wishart’s idea for the opera, whi…
The Vox Cycle
"In 1980 I decided to write a cycle of 6 vocal pieces dealing with many different aspects of what it means to be ‘human’, and using the voice as the focus for this exploration. The new piece ‘VOX’, would begin with the sounds of the creation as suggested in various creation myths from around the world (VOX 1), and lead eventually to the disintegration of human society (VOX 4). In between these two poles, VOX2 would deal with contemplation of the natural world, and VOX3 with the excitement of int…
The Secret Resonance of Things
A new release from Trevor Wishart, based variously on data from Supernova explosions, Chaotic and Turbulent processes and Physical Models of Imaginary musical instruments. Like his 'Encounters in the Republic of Heaven' (with which it shares the format of a booklet containing a CD) this was originally an 8 channel sound-surround performance piece an the CD contains a stereo remix. The booklet explains the scientific data underlying the project. It is very detailed and acedemic, but the music its…
Audible Design
In the past, the quality or nature of sounds used in music was set by the technology of instrument design, and conventions about performance and musical 'expression'. In the 19th century, european composers became increasingly concerned with 'sonority', through development of new orchestration techniques, and new instruments. However, a systematic approach to sound itself had to wait for the invention of sound recording and the accurate computer analysis of sounds. Studios, and then computers, a…
Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream
A milestone!! Sub Rosa presents another installment in its Early Electronic series, a silver vinyl reissue of Trevor Wishart's Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream, composed between 1973 and 1977 using the studio of the University of York, and originally released in 1978 by York Electronic Studios. Wishart's compositional interests deal mainly with the interpolation by technological means between the human voice and natural sounds. He has been very active since the early 1970s in the area…
Sound Composition
A collection of writings with 2 CDs of sound examples, based on talks presented over several years, describing in some detail the compositional approaches and working methods involved in the production of many of Trevor Wishart's musical works. Includes a discussion of sound diffusion, and diffusion scores (with worked examples) for most of the electro-acoustics works. Sound Composition is a collection of writings with accompanying sound examples detailing the composition of musical works where …
Encounters in the Republic of Heaven
2011 release. Amazing work completed Sept. 2011, an exploration of the music inherent in everyday speech, collected from all kinds of oral sound sources (fishermen, farmers, city-dwellers, etc.), highly processed vocal material between musique concrete & experimental earplay; comes with lovely 64p book
"Encounter in the Republic of Heaven” is a multi channel electro acoustic surround piece where Wishart works with phonemes as a musical phenomena in combination with storytelling. The materi…
Globalalia / Imago
2012 Release. "Globalalia is a 29 minute piece using syllables taken from 26 different languages, to create a series of elaborate variations on the sounds of language itself. Commissioned by Folkmar Hein and premiered at Inventionen 2004 in Berlin, June 2004, the piece was originally available on the DVD '50 Years Studio TU Berlin'. Voices in 26 languages were collected from the airwaves, and cut into over 8300 spoken syllables. These were organized in a database and then used to create a …
Red Bird/Anticredos & Voiceprints
ICR is proud to announce the re-release of a double CD of 2 seminal works of UK electroacoustic music by Trevor Wishart. "This Double Album brings together many of my major pieces from the last 40 years. "Red Bird" has been held up as a pioneering work, using both a "cinematic" approach to audio, and sound morphing, especially because it predates the use of computers but prefigures many of the techniques later used for making computer sound art. "Anticredos" brought together my research int…
Inventionen VII: 30 jahre inventionen 1982 - 2012
* Five hours of electroacoustical compositions, recorded during the first thirty years of the Berlin festival “Inventionen”. Box set with two audio CDs and a multichannel (surroundsound) DVD * Mindblowing two re-releases of Edition RZ LPs that are now available in this double CD box with additional tracks, as well as a mainly acousmatic DVD that features electronic tracks by a variety of electroacoustic composers. The present DVD contains mainly acousmatic music. This is when a pure "tape piece"…
Fanfare & Contrapunctus / Imago
TERRIFIC!!! Housed in custom printed outer-pvc with a design aesthetic worthy of the music contained within** After owning our ears with the Keith Fullerton Whitman album last week, Pan Records present a compelling trio of important recordings from visionary sound art composer, Trevor Wishart - available on vinyl for the first time. Since the mid '70s Trevor has conducted "systematic research into various vocal-speech figures and the possibilities for their noting, giving special emphasis …
Tongues Of Fire
A 25-minute CD EP from 1994. by this renowned UK tape/voice/concrete composer. "Explores our human aspirations and absurdities, through the musical transformation of the human voice. The slightly angry, disgruntled, comic mutterings with which the piece begins are the source of all the sounds, which appear in it: sounds suggesting drums, water, metallic resonances, fireworks, or entirely imaginary materials or events, all generated through processes of sound-transformation on the computer. 'Ton…
Machine
Although Machine was completed in 1971 it was not released until 1973, shortly after the release of Journey Into Space. Machine is therefore the first major composition by Trevor Wishart. It was composed at York University and was originally issued on vinyl as 3 sides of a highly adventurous 3LP box set called Electronic Music From York, released by the University’s own record label. In common with Journey Into Space (also on Paradigm Discs), Machine makes use of a large number of volunteer cont…
Inventionen 98
A documentary of pieces performed at the Inventionen Festival in Berlin, 1998. Features: Unsuk Chin, Patrick Kosk, Werner Cee, Francois Donato, Robin Minard, Wolfgang Mitterer, Francis Dhomont, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Trevor Wishart. "Not as much as a bringer-up to speed (or yet another history lesson at that) as a fine cache of current keepers of the crop. New ('93-98), complete pieces from Trevor Wishart (northern-UK composer/programmer known and loved these days for his mid-70's works such as M…
Red bird - Anticredos
Extremely great reissue of the previously-semi-available-but-not-so-for-quite-a-l ong-time October Music CD (which itself was a reissue of the 1977 LP on Wishart's own Yes imprint, along with the piece 'Anticredos' for 6 voices, from an LP on Hyperion, 1982). Recent developments in Wishart's street cred (contributing to Or Some Computer Music Issue One, being name-dropped by Richie Devine on several occasions, Aphex Twin's use of CDP) seem to suddenly make Trevor... relevant to a younger set of …
Journey into Space
York University's music department houses one of the UK's first-ever
electronic music studios, and during the early '70s, it was a hotbed of
creative activity. Much of the released output from the studio at this
time revolved around the work of the dynamic composer Trevor Wishart. Journey Into Space
was his first release, composed between 1970 and 1972, and was
privately-pressed (shortly before the formation of YES records), as two
separate LPs in 1973. (The CD cover amalgamates the two or…
Voiceprints
Master composer Trevor Wishart shapes recordings of the human voice into a majestic, sonic extravaganza. With satire, sympathy, and his extraordinary talent with sound, Wishart gives us an audio panorama of the world today through the voices of many different people, famous and unknown. You'll hear the voice of Margaret Thatcher as a political cartoon, a touching portrait of Princess Diana, the powerful resonance of Martin Luther King's well-known words, the crackly voice of Neil Armstrong, the …