Two Pioneers of Sonic Invention: Why Peter Evans and Trevor Wishart Are Both Great—in Their Own Ways

 

The world of experimental music is vast, and few figures have pushed its boundaries as persistently and distinctively as the American trumpeter Peter Evans and the British composer-theorist Trevor Wishart. At first glance they seem to inhabit different planets: one is a fire-breathing virtuoso improviser who can make a trumpet sound like a malfunctioning supercollider, the other a cerebral architect of electro-acoustic landscapes and vocal metamorphosis. Yet both have redefined what music can be in the 21st century, each through radically different means. Their greatness does not compete; it complements.

Peter Evans: The Body as Instrument, the Moment as Cosmos

Peter Evans (b. 1981) is arguably the most important brass improviser of his generation. Trained in both jazz and contemporary classical traditions, he abandoned nearly every convention of trumpet playing to treat the instrument as raw physical material—lips, air, metal, spit, and electricity.

What makes Evans extraordinary is not mere extended technique (circular breathing, multiphonics, microtonal fingerings) but the way he organizes these sounds into coherent, high-intensity musical narratives in real time. Listen to his solo trumpet album More Is More (2010) or the staggering 72-minute improvisation Genesis (recorded live in 2016): what could devolve into noise instead becomes a universe of splintering galaxies, sudden silences, and impossible melodic fragments that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

Evans achieves something close to total freedom without falling into chaos. His music is athletic, dangerous, and deeply human. You can hear the sweat, the trembling embouchure, the moment when the body almost fails and then transcends. In ensembles like the Peter Evans Quintet or his duo with drummer Jim Black, he proves that hyper-virtuosity can still swing, still tell stories, still surprise. Few musicians alive can make you forget that a trumpet is “supposed” to sound a certain way.

Trevor Wishart: The Mind as Laboratory, Sound as Clay

Trevor Wishart (b. 1946) operates at the opposite pole: he rarely performs live, almost never improvises, and his instruments are software environments and the recorded human voice. Yet his influence on contemporary music—especially electro-acoustic, spectral, and sound-art practice—is arguably deeper than any British composer since Stockhausen.

Wishart’s landmark works—Red Bird (1977), Vox cycle (1980–88), Globalalia (2004), and the software toolkit Sound Loom (built on his CDP processors)—treat sound as infinitely malleable substance. In Vox-5, a single spoken syllable can be stretched, granulated, and spectrally smeared until it becomes a roaring beast, a flock of birds, or a cathedral of whispering ghosts. His book On Sonic Art (1985, revised 1996) remains one of the most lucid philosophical treatments of sound organization ever written, arguing that timbre and transformation, not pitch or rhythm, are the true frontiers of musical thought.

Where Evans lives in the adrenaline of the present instant, Wishart inhabits a god-like perspective over time. He can take a child saying “please may I have some more” and turn it into a 40-minute political-philosophical meditation on power and desire (Tongues of Fire, 1994). His work anticipates by decades the granular synthesis and vocal-chopping obsessions of today’s electronic producers, yet it is never merely technical; it is always about meaning, myth, and the uncanny.

Two Approaches, One Shared Radicalism

Evans and Wishart both reject the commodified, note-centric language that still dominates most concert halls and jazz clubs. They insist that music can—and must—begin from raw sound itself.

• Evans does it through the body in real time: risk, physicality, spontaneity.
• Wishart does it through the mind across vast stretches of composed time: concept, metamorphosis, utopian imagination.

One gives us the thrill of a high-wire act with no net; the other gives us a slowly turning kaleidoscope that reveals new worlds every time you blink. Both prove that “great musicianship” is not a single standard but a multitude of possible excellences.

In an era where so much music feels pre-digested, Peter Evans reminds us that a human being, armed only with lungs and brass, can still conjure apocalypse and tenderness in the same breath. Trevor Wishart reminds us that once sound is liberated from its source, entire civilizations of ear-born creatures can be born.

They are not competitors for the same crown. They are twin explorers who took different paths up the same impossible mountain—and both reached summits no one else can see from the valley below.