Frank Denyer
Frank Denyer was born in London on 12 April 1943. He was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1967 he founded the experimental ensemble Mouth of Hermes. From 1974 to 1981 he did ethnomusicological fieldwork in West Asia and northern India, then joined Dartington College of Arts in Devon, where he taught composition until 2010. His music uses microtonality and unusual placement of players. With the shakuhachi player Yoshikazu Iwamoto he made Wheat and Stalks. Mode released Faint Traces and Silenced Voices.
Screens
British composer Frank Denyer (born London, 1943) presents an extraordinary collection of five works spanning nearly fifty years of creative activity, performed by the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves. This release, recorded at the Menuhin School in Surrey in September 2022, serves as a landmark document of one of the most original voices in contemporary music.
The album includes Broken Music (1990) featuring a bewildering array of instruments including flute, piccolo, crow call, me…
Melodies
*In process of stocking* An extraordinary project arising from Frank Denyer’s ethno-musicological studies in the 1970’s, which forced him to go back to basics and ask himself ‘what is a melody?’ and ‘what is a note?’ Frank answered these questions by composing a series of 25 pieces starting from single-note melodies, through melodies with 2, 3 or 4 notes, ending with more complex pieces with 14- and 15-note melodies. A wonderful double CD, with a 24-page booklet containing an essay by Frank de…
The Fish That Became the Sun
Frank Denyer’s The Fish that became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) stands as one of the most ambitious and singular orchestral creations of recent decades. Conceived over several years and premiered over twenty years after completion, this piece distills Denyer’s fascination with sonic diversity and theatrical intensity. The score assembles a phantasmagoria of acoustic colors: alongside chorus and solo violin, one encounters sitar, crumhorns, cimbalom, children’s songs, and a host of constr…
The Boundaries of Intimacy
British composer Frank Denyer presents seven beautiful chamber works dating from 1974 to 2018, opening a door to his unique soundworld. Released by Another Timbre in November 2019, The Boundaries of Intimacy features sublime, unexpected pieces of delicate intimacy performed by a variety of artists including Luna String Quartet, Juliet Fraser, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenberg and Nobutaka Yoshizawa.
"Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listeni…
Whispers
Whispers is a cycle of five idiosyncratic works spanning 2010–2014, composed and directed by Frank Denyer and performed by The Barton Workshop (with Denyer, Kiku Day, Juliet Fraser, Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenburg, Pepe Garcia Rodriguez, Dario Calderone, Bob Gilmore, Jamie Man, and others). The title track, “Whispers,” is a procession of seventeen short vocal meditations: Denyer’s own whispered, murmured, and muttered sounds traced by rare instrumental gestures- muted…
Music For Shakuhachi
Four works spanning two decades document an extraordinary musical collaboration between British composer Frank Denyer and shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto. They met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1974, where Denyer was a doctoral student in ethnomusicology and Iwamoto artist-in-residence in the World Music programme. What emerged is a folio of compositions that run like a vein through Denyer's output - a body of work unique in contemporary music.
Denyer was not interested in east-we…
Faint Traces
Six chamber works by Frank Denyer from 1973-2001, including Out of the Shattered Shadows 1 and 2, Faint Traces, Music for Two Performers, Play and Passages, in composer-supervised performances by The Barton Workshop.
Silenced Voices
Four recent works by Frank Denyer for very quiet voices and rarely combined instruments, including muted strings, flute, clarinet and percussion, played by The Barton Workshop under Denyer and James Fulkerson.
Fired City
Composer, theoretician, inventor and instrument builder Frank Denyer is a legendary figure in the Harry Partch/Scelsi tradition. His music is utterly unique and intensely personal, often requiring specialized new instruments of his own design and radical playing techniques. Fired City presents six of his most dynamic compositions in definitive performances supervised by the composer himself. Having worked closely with Denyer for many years, The Barton Workshop is unsurpassed in this repertoire a…