Trevor
Wishart Encounters in the Republic of Heaven
Act
4
The
Poet’s Tale:
Keith
Armstrong recalls the funnier side of being a poet. “This guy says
to me ‘Who needs poets? I look after a man with one leg’ ..... we
imagined the ducks were reading the music (that’s what wine does)
....as we entered the palace of culture there was a huge oil-painting
of Stalin. So I said to my friend Tony, ‘this is going to be a fun
night’.... A toast! To the Cosmos!”
Trevor
Wishart (born 11 October 1946 in Leeds, UK) is an English
composer, based in York. Wishart has contributed to composing with
digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. He has also written
extensively on the topic of what he terms "sonic art”, and
contributed to the design and implementation of software tools used
in the creation of digital music; notably, the Composers Desktop
Project. Wishart's compositional interests deal mainly with the human
voice, in particular with thse transformation of it and the
interpolation by technological means between human voice and natural
sounds. This is most evident in his albums Red Bird/Anticredos
(1973-77) and VOX Cycle (1980 1988), and also in the compositions
Tongues of Fire (1993-93), Globalalia (2003-2004), Two Women (1998),
and American Triptych (1999). He is also a solo voice performer and
an improviser of extended vocal techniques, using the recordings of
his own improvisations to compose his electroacoustic pieces as well,
like he did for Red Bird and Vox 5.
