Frank Denyer at 60: Butterfly effect

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Gilmore, Bob

BOB GILMORE introduces the work of 'one of the better kept secrets of English music', whose birthday falls in April

MUSIC HISTORY NEEDS a special category for those composers who, with their three-score years knocking ominously at the door and a substantial body of compositions already behind them, find their life's work unengraced by an entry in the New Grove. Such is the case with Frank Denver, born in London in 1943, whose name is conspicuous by its absence between 'Denver' (Colorado) and 'Denza, Luigi'. Nor, for that matter, will you catch many of his works in a trawl of concert programmes from the city of his birth over the past few decades. Yet however dismal the implications of such institutional neglect (insignificance! marginality! obscurity!), all may not yet be lost: there are signs today of a counter-trend, the growing recognition by a number of contemporary musicians that the body of work Denver has created over the past forty years is - just maybe - one of the better-kept secrets of English music.

Thankfully, no-one really believes that art is best understood in its own time. Ours is an age of revisionist history-writing: if we are confident of anything today it is that whatever view subsequent generations take of our own time it will certainly be different to ours. And, as Denyer himself has pointed out, we need not a single history of music but many. It matters not only when and where music is created but also when and to whom it becomes known. We breathe life into music by the act of appreciation, when it enters the bloodstream, exerts its presence, changes our perceptions.

In our new century Frank Denyer's music is just beginning to receive the attention largely denied it by the last. It must be said that he has not exactly made life easy for those wanting to programme his works. Assembling the personnel for After the rain (1983), for violin, shakuhachi, three ocarina players and percussionist, seems just about manageable - the London Sinfonietta did it in 1997. Less easy to get together, though far from impossible, is Towards the darkness (1989), for three double basses (with or without buzz attached), three flautists who play plunger flutes and tin whistles, and two percussionists who play friction drums, a plank of wood, a bass drum, tin foil, a small ratchet, a ruler vibrating against a surface, a bag of marbles, a tam tam, and two concrete paving stones. But where, I wonder, is the festival director fearless enough to tackle The fish that became the sun (1991-94), for four female vocalists, four male vocalists (who also play eunuch flutes), seven percussionists with non-- standard instruments, solo violin, sitar, mandolin, cimbalom, three double basses, contra-bassoon, harmonium, six woodwind players (on specially adapted organ pipes/crumhorns, various whistles and a shell trumpet), two child vocalists (aged 5-7), and eight off-stage comets? This forty-sevenminute tapestry of 'songs of the dispossessed' still awaits its first performance.

While it is true that Denyer's use of such unconventional ensembles and newly invented or modified instruments has limited the number of performances of his music, I believe there are deeper reasons why his work is only now becoming better known. We are always a bit nervous in the presence of composers who so resolutely refuse to play the game, who distance themselves from the norms of music-making of their day and cultivate such remote territory with so few recognisable signposts. It bothers us: we are exasperated by them: we wonder why they can't, just this once, make a step in the direction of common practice and write, say, a string quartet, rather than a Quartet for flute, double bass, cimbalom and steel pans (1988-90: one of his most engaging and colourful works). We bemoan the fact they will gladly spend a year writing a forty-five-minute work for solo shakuhachi (Unnamed, 1997, composed for and premiered by Yoshikazu Iwamoto, and so far untouched by anyone else), and yet turn down a commission for chamber orchestra.

But to entertain such thoughts about Denyer is as pointless as it would be in the case of Ives, or Partch, or Scelsi, or any of the composers who have so generously enriched our musical experience in previously unimagined areas. Denyer himself has a disarmingly simple explanation: the new sound-worlds of his pieces come about not from a quest for originality for its own sake but from the fact that most conventional Western instruments and groupings of instruments are so clogged up with fixed identities of their own that he feels the need to find more diverse starting points. 'It's not a question of disapproving of conventional forms,' he remarks,

it's just that I have no ideas for them. Even as a student I came to feel there were more and more sounds I couldn't use. Every instrument I could think of, before I could even think of a note, was sort of done for, because I'd heard so many pieces for it. There didn't seem to be any music left to write. So, I just had to find a little corner somewhere. Always I want to find one instrument I can connect with, that I can make a gesture with, that I can possibly live with. It's a kind of desperation.