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Frank Denyer

Frank Denyer is an English composer whose brilliantly coloured and imaginatively rich compositions fall between several and into none of the accepted categories of contemporary music.

Born in London in 1943, he was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral by the age of nine, the director of the experimental music ensemble Mouth of Hermes in London at the age of twenty-five, and a Doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, Connecticut at the age of thirty. He has lived and worked in east Africa and India.

Denyer’s music is distinguished by a keen sensitivity to sound. Each of his works is written for a unique combination of instruments, more often than not a combination that no composer has dreamed of before. Each work finds its own individual form, laying down the path for its journey as it proceeds. In some cases even such basic musical materials as the scales and the tuning system are invented from scratch. This music is handmade in every detail; it is engaged in a complex process of affirmation and negation, accepting no easy solutions.

For Denyer, a fine pianist who has composed not one note for his own instrument since his student days, the whole question of musical instruments is a central one. His compositions present an astonishingly varied array of sound sources – new instruments of his own invention, adapted instruments, instruments of non Western traditions, rare or virtually extinct instruments, and conventional Western instruments. This whole concern with what his friend Morton Feldman called ‘the instrumental factor’ is not a postmodern mixing-and-matching of instruments from different ‘ethnic’ traditions: rather, his work suggests that all instruments bear the imprint of the tradition of which they are a part, whether that tradition be nascent, mature or decaying, and that at the beginning of the twenty-first century we cannot afford to be complacent about which musical traditions we consider to be ‘ours.’ Neither is his music that of a composer making do with ready-mades or whatever lies to hand (like Cage’s percussion ensemble works of the 1930s and early 1940s). Nor, at the other extreme, does one have the sense of the composer gradually assembling an instrumentarium of his own, creating the illusion of an alternative musical universe (like Harry Partch): for one thing, Denyer’s assembly of new instruments hardly ever plays together; for another, they rarely recur from one work to the next – each new composition wipes the slate clean and starts afresh. The instruments are like flowers that suddenly spring up between the cracks in a wall; they seem to be there because the opportunity has arisen for them to exist, to fill the gaps between isolated islands of instrumental sound.

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3
Album Review

Frank Denyer: Screens

Read "Screens" reviewed by John Eyles


Composer Frank Denyer was born in London, in April 1943. Screens, recorded at the Menuhin School in Surrey, England, in September 2022, serves to mark the milestone of Denyer's eightieth birthday. It is his sixth album on Another Timbre, his first having been the label's third release, Music for Shakuhachi (2007); that featured four Denyer compositions for solo shakuhachi or shakuhachi plus percussion, performed by shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto at a time when the newly-formed label seemed more interested in ...

2
Album Review

Frank Denyer: Melodies

Read "Melodies" reviewed by John Eyles


London-born composer Frank Denyer has a long and varied career dating back to the 1960s. This two-disc album, released in plenty of time for his eightieth birthday on April 4th 2023, is the most recent of a dozen albums which have been released featuring his compositions, the first having beenWheat (Orchid, 1984) released on vinyl. Five of the six released since 2007 have been on Another Timbre, the first of those, Music for Shakuhachi having been that label's third release. ...

4
Multiple Reviews

Old and new Frank Denyer

Read "Old and new Frank Denyer" reviewed by John Eyles


It can often be difficult for a record label to follow a release as successful as Another Timbre's monumental five-disc set Morton Feldman Piano has proved to be, so the next wave of five releases on the label is particularly interesting. Of the five, two are by British composer Frank Denyer who has had two previous recordings on the label, including its third release, Music for Shakuhachi (2007), which jostled for attention alongside improv releases by players such as John ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Screens

Another Timbre
2023

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