Last Notes From Endenich

Printed programme for British première in Manchester June 11th 1978

Last Notes from Endenich featured in a collaborative performance by academics and artists, Music Futures/Sonic Pasts: Imagined Instruments, Imagined Music, at Cafe Oto London on Monday 18th July 2022.

From the artist's statement

Last Notes From Endenich started life purely as a drawing without notion of performance. Self evidently it relates to the orthographics of notation (stave, note forms etc.) which have always enchanted me in their own right. As I worked on it I was reminded of Schumann’s final years in the asylum at Endenich and the many fragments of music he made there which Clara destroyed to protect his reputation. It was the French composer Jean Yves Bosseur who suggested its use as a template for improvisation and it was he who, on a pilgrimage to Endenich itself, discovered the last actual surviving melody by Schumann. This melody from the Endenich period here serves as a starting point for the players of the Ensemble in their improvisational reading of the graphic score. The A that occurs at the ‘beginning’ of the drawing (i.e. on the left) seems to represent by coincidence the constant A natural that sounded tinitically through the composer’s head. Though the musicians here are performing a drawing, the drawing they work from itself performs a piece.