Frank Denyer
Born 1943
Composer & Koto
|
Frank Denyer (born April 12, 1943 in London) is a composer. His music uses 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's music has remained resolutely independent of musical fashion. An early interest in melody in the 1970s has remained a feature of his work (as seen perhaps in its most extreme form in his works for shakuhachi, collected on the 2007 CD Music for shakuhachi. His music shows an extraordinary ear for timbre, and for novel combinations of acoustic sounds. The first of his large-scale works, A Monkey's Paw (premiered at Darmstadt in 1990; see Discography) displays this clearly. More recently an interest in extremely quiet sounds has characterised several works, including Prison Song, Faint Traces and Tentative Thoughts, Silenced Voices (collectively forming his Prison Trilogy (1999–2003)). Though not a shakuhachi player himself, Denyer has collaborated with Yoshikazu Iwamoto, (his former neighbor), to write pieces for the instrument, including: After the Rain, Wheat, The Tender Sadness of Tyrants as They Dance, Stalks, Winged Play, Unnamed, and later with shakuhachi player Kiku Day, for whom he wrote Woman with Jinashi Shakuhachi.
|
|
|
Composed or Arranged
| Shakuhachi Compositions | |||
| Title | Kanji | Year | Alternate Title |
| Quite White | |||
| On, on - it must be so | 1977 |
||
| Wheat | 1977 - 1981 |