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Stevie wonder

Stevie Wishart wants to travel to other worlds: "other sound worlds"

With each installment of Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations: The Complete Hildegard von Bingen, the singer, musician and composer, Stevie Wishart, takes you with her. To the twelfth century, to be precise, where the mystic composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen wrote lyrics and musical notations in her own invented script.

A musicologist who studied at Oxford, Wishart has been interpreting and transcribing the music of this medieval figure for her vocal trio, Sinfonye. Along with the voices of Vivien Ellis and Jocelyn West, Sinfonye is distinguished by the stringed, somnabulent hum of an intermittent hurdy—gurdy as well as touches of medieval fiddle, both played by Wishart. To her mind, a northern European instrument such as the hurdy—gurdy can act as a kind of lost sound key to the past—to something we can feel, rather than explain.

• Mark Mordue

April, 1996

15019 SHOALHAVEN RISE - RILEY LEE, MICHAEL ASKILL AND MICHAEL ATHERTON

Sunset at Bundanon, Arthur Boyd's property on the NSW coast. Boyd is jamming with musicians in an open–air concert, not quite rapping, but this kind voice flows over the New Age music—the soft jazz for sleepers and daydreamers. Some 200 guests get to float into the evening for the CD launch of Shoalhaven Rise, a self–styled "mystical journey". The musicians are Riley Lee on shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), Michael Atherton (a multi–instrumentalist with an interest in "early music" and ethnomusicology), Michael Askill (percussion) and Askill's son, Daniel, on bass guitar. Inspired by Boyd's series of paintings, Crucifixion, they worked at the artist's property, and in turn inspired him to create a painting for the CD cover. Shoalhaven Rise is now out on the Celestial Harmonies label.