Frank Denyer

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Frank Denyer (London, 1943 – ) is a composer. Also a trained pianist, Denyer does not compose for the piano. Instead, he focuses on creating music for a combination of conventional instruments and new, unusual, and structurally modified instruments. Partly due to his studies of non-Western music, much of Denyer's music is microtonal.

Denyer was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and later studied at the Guildhall in London and did his PhD at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In London in the late sixties he founded the contemporary ensemble The Mouth of Hermes. After fieldwork in Africa he began teaching at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, where is he Professor of Composition. He co-founded the Barton Workshop in Amsterdam in 1990 to perform American experimental music and his own compositions.

Recordings of Denyer's music are available on several labels, including Etcetera, Continuum, Mode, and Tzadik Records.

Contents

[edit] Compositions for shakuhachi

Though not a shakuhachi player himself, Denyer has collaborated with musician Iwamoto Yoshikazu to write pieces for the instrument, including:

  • After the Rain
  • Wheat
  • The Tender Sadness of Tyrants as They Dance
  • Stalks
  • Winged Play
  • Unnamed (unrecorded)

[edit] Discography

  • Faint Traces. Mode, 2005.
  • Fired City. Tzadik, 2002.
  • Finding Refuge in the Remains. Etcetera, 1998.
  • The Contrabass Saxophone. Earup, 1996.
  • Konink & Andriessen: Notes 94. Walpurgis, 1994.
  • A Monkey's Paw. Continuum, 1991.
  • Wheat: The Music of Frank Denyer. Orchid Records, 1984.

[edit] Writings

  • Denyer, Frank (ed.) & Landy, Leigh (ed.). Leaving the Twentieth Century: Ideas & Visions of New Musics. Harwood Academic Pub., 1997. ISBN 90-5702-104-8.
  • Denyer, Frank. Finding the fish (1994) in Contemporary Music Review, 1996, vol. 15, nos 3-4.
  • Denyer, Frank. Finding a Voice in an Age of Migration (1994) in Contemporary Music Review, 1996, vol. 15, nos 3-4.
  • Denyer, Frank. The Shakuhachi and the Contemporary Music Instrumentarium: a Personal View (1991) in Contemporary Music Review, 1994, vol. 6, no. 2.

[edit] External links

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