Frank Denyer at 60: Butterfly effect

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Gilmore, Bob

The music of the past twenty years has moved a long way, in complexity and emotional range, from the music of the seventies. The commitment to melody has remained, indeed intensified, although now set increasingly in the context of ensemble rather than solo pieces. All of his music is distinguished by a keen sensitivity to sound, and the new instruments of his own invention that he occasionally uses - eunuch flutes, shells, slates, pebbles, the resonance of wood and of metal - create some extraordinary textures. In several works Denyer creates his own unusual kind of Klangfarbenmelodie: in others he builds passages by the fusion of timbres. Towards the darkness, for example, ends with the loud rubbing together of concrete paving stones synchronised with shrill blasts on three tin whistles - a sound to quicken the pulse of any sample-hungry young musician.

One of the recurrent images in the recent music is the sense of new life struggling for existence under the debris of the old. His whole concern with musical instruments, new, modified, or nearly extinct, can perhaps be seen as a metaphor for the larger question of what can be salvaged, artistically, from the chaos of civilisation as we begin a new century This image is at its sharpest focus in A monkeys paw (1987-88), which enjoyed a kind of grudging success at Darmstadt in 1990 (surely the best kind of accolade). This work takes as its starting point the image of a hideously decayed monkey's paw kept hidden inside a small drum used in healing ceremonies in east Africa. `That this grotesque object [...] should hold the secret of regeneration and renewed human health seemed to have a profound meaning for me', Denyer has written. Finding refuge in the remains (1992) also confronts this central issue, the sense of new life emerging from a morass of dead or decaying matter - an issue which, one feels, has for him a sense both of compositional and cultural urgency

A new approach to this question is manifest in Unnamed, for solo shakuhachi, premiered at Dartington in 1999, and restated in sharp resolution in Out of the shattered shadows 2 (1999), Prison song (2000) and Faint traces (2001). (Or do these works in fact pose a different set of questions? Time will tell...) This has taken the form of an intense concentration on extremely quiet sounds, sounds so soft and delicate that they seem in danger of disappearing altogether, of being brutally nudged out of existence. Until its very last moments, Unnamed hardly rises above a mezzopiano, and most of it is much quieter. In Out of the shattered shadows 2 the Denyerian ensemble textures proceed for about half of the work's sixteen minutes before being interrupted by the faint music of an offstage cornett, violin and female voice. It is as though the doors of the concert hall have suddenly been opened and we become aware that another music has been there the whole time. His is a radically new kind of quiet music, distinct from that of Feldman or Sciarrino. To risk a generalisation, I'd suggest that if Feldman's very quiet music tends to draw us in, both towards the music and towards him - even at times claustrophobically so - Denyer's makes us aware of the world outside: it reminds us that life is going on elsewhere while we pay attention to the conceits of art. To me the masterpiece in this genre is Prison song (ex.3), a tremendous exercise of compositional restraint operating on evanescent wisps of musical material, quite unlike the music of any other composer writing today.