Josephine Stephenson

Anamnesis

This piece was inspired by a photograph of Phoebe Theodora's called 'One summer in London’, selected for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012. It shows a young woman sitting naked against a white wall with a stunned, melancholic look on her face. Looking at the picture and asking myself what might possibly be going through this person’s mind, I imagined her as trying to recall half-forgotten events of the previous night. In an attempt to express this presumably confused and disorganised flow of thoughts, I chose to leave the ordering of certain musical fragments in the piece to the performer. (Josephine Stephenson)