Frank Denyer at 60: Butterfly effect

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Gilmore, Bob

Denyer's career had, on paper at least, a relatively conventional beginning. Following early musical experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and studies at the Guildhall School in London, he founded the contemporary ensemble Mouth of Hermes and served as director and sometime keyboard player during the seven years of its existence, 1967-74 (as he did also for its shorter-lived sibling, the Anglo-Dutch Amalgam). While never as well known as the contemporaneous Scratch Orchestra or the Fires of London, Mouth of Hermes gave a number of important concerts including British premieres of works by Cage, Scelsi, Kondo and Feldman (with whom they toured in the early seventies). Denyer's own early compositions featured in their programmes, most notably in the whole evening devoted to his music at the Festival d'Orleans in March 1973. The concert, although successful enough in itself, proved a turning point in his development: shortly thereafter he withdrew no fewer than nine of the ten works in the programme, discarded some entirely and rewrote others (which, risen from the ashes, became A book of emblems and songs). It was a way of purging himself of the unwanted residues of earlier influences - perhaps even of the entire sixties, the decade with the longest musical hangover in recent history. He then set out on the path that he has followed ever since.

The primary musical subject of the works that immediately followed is melody He had reached a compositional impasse where he needed to rethink such basic concepts as note, step, ornament, portamento: this led him gradually towards a melodic language of great suppleness and richness. It can be heard in works such as Frog (1974) or A fragile thread (1979), both for solo string instrument (muted violin or viola, but there are also less conventional performance possibilities): and in the cycle Melodies (1974-77, still unperformed in its entirety), 'a work in twenty-- five movements that can be adapted to instruments of various cultural origins, some that have to be specially made, and voices', each movement of which is 'a melodic study in intonation'. A further example, this time not purely monodic, is The hanged fiddler (1973), for violin, sustaining instrument and percussion (ex. 1), inspired by the legend of a fiddler who is accused of horse stealing and sentenced to hanging but who, before the noose is tightened, is allowed to play one last tune from the gallows. Here a virtuosic violin line of unrelenting energy and subtle twists and turns is set against the pounding of a bass drum and the ticking of a pair of bones. The violin is shadowed by a sustaining instrument which captures and holds isolated notes from its line, creating an eerie and unpredictably changing drone.

Crucial to Denyer's new musical direction was a prolonged involvement with non-western musical traditions, principally Indian, Japanese and African. The benefit of travel outside Europe to his exploration of new concepts of melody (and, increasingly, of all the other parameters of music as well) was considerable. His first spell of ethnomusicological fieldwork was in 1973, in the Kulu valley in North India: the following year he began a PhD at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, specialising in Japanese music. From 1978-81 he was Research Fellow in African Music at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, studying the music of nomadic pastoralists such as the Pokot tribe, among whom he lived for brief spells. Some years later, in 1987, he undertook further fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone.