Josephine Stephenson

Composed in 2016 for the Maîtrise de Radio France, 'Ce n'était pas nous' for upper voices sets short poems by Antoine Thiollier which are at once playful and serious.

Composed in 2020 at the invitation of the Festival de Chaillol for the vocal ensemble Musicatreize, 'Lands Unseen' for 6 voices a cappella sets poems of four female writers from different places and t...

Eja, mater, fons amoris (‘O, Mother, fountain of love’) sets an extract from the 13th-century latin poem Stabat Mater, a hymn to the Virgin Mary describing her suffering during her son’s crucifixion....

The text is based on Petrarch’s sonnet 'Or ch’l ciel e la terra’, famously set by Monteverdi in his 8th book of madrigals. In English, the piece strips the words to an elementary, quasi-abstract form,...

Rosemary Lane is an arrangement of the traditional folk song which tells the story of a domestic worker being seduced by a sailor. I took the liberty of freely re-harmonising the melody to bring out t...

This 'little musical postcard' composed for the Maîtrise de Radio France Children's Choir during the pandemic is based on a text by Antoine Thiollier. The image of the bridges was self-evident to brin...

Composed in 2019 to accompany the opéra NARCISSE, 'Vendeur d'étoiles' for upper voices and piano sets texts by Marion Pellissier written as exchanges between members of a social network.

The Sestina is a fixed verse poetic form dating from the 12th century. It has a fascinating, very strict structure, consisting principally of six stanzas of six lines each, and requiring that the six...

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 wo...

It is almost fifty years since Adrienne Rich refused to take for herself the National Book Award for Poetry she had just won for her collection 'Diving into the Wreck' (1974), instead sharing it with...

In English, those who rest" are the dead: those who have gone before. In French, on the other hand, those who "restent" are the survivors, those who remain, who stay behind. In her diptych for mezzo-s...

“At the invitation of the Trio Haydée, I teamed up with the contemporary author & illustrator Diglee to create a new work for 'De lumières et de cieux embrasés', a programme made up entirely of pieces...

From a short French poem by Antoine Thiollier, Stephenson uses an Oulipian process to amalgamate the words with similar sounding English words to gradually abstract the meaning behind them; the words...

Enero' for solo guitar has been commissioned by Listenpony and first performed by Laura Snowden at Listenpony #15, Crypt on the Green, on 30th January 2018.

“Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps - That may shake down into a world, perhaps […]” (Robert Graves, The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers). Those were the words that led me on the composition o...