Frank Denyer

For the 30th anniversary of Awards for Artists, we interviewed 12 previous recipients in conversation with Lilli Geissendorfer.

At rehearsals in Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill, London 2018. Photo credit: Suhail Merchant

“Trust artists to know and do the things most useful to their art. That is the most valuable thing.”

Frank Denyer was an Awards for Artists recipient as an elder statesman in 2018. Born in 1943, he has been a pioneer in his field for generations and offers a unique perspective on the changing context for composers in the UK. “It has been a very productive time, especially for an artist like myself, a composer, working alone in small rooms. We suffer from isolation – it’s an occupational hazard!” he jokes – but he’s serious too.

“Especially in times like ours, when new thinking about the arts is not exactly at peak value, to get an Award like this is very encouraging – someone out there has noticed one exists!” He is repeatedly scathing about the rising neoliberalism and pursuit of commercial profit that he feels has come at the expense of arts and culture over recent decades.

Impact of the Award

“The most outstanding thing about this Award is ‘no strings attached’, no bureaucracy – it’s trust. There are so many forces out there in the world, it can be hard to justify [doing what I do], so encouragement is crucial.”

Fascinatingly, he describes how, in the absence of the Award, he may well have done exactly the same things – but having the ability to fund things “makes the conversation very different.” Elaborating, he explains: “It has given me confidence to go into conversations knowing I could [fund things], and avoid all the ‘begging stuff’. Having the means to cover the costs of recording; without having to rely on the funding I’ve applied for – means it can go ahead either way. I can say to people ‘it will go ahead either way’, rather than ‘please tentatively pencil things’, which just makes such a difference.”

Rehearsing Alvin Lucier’s ‘Still Lives’ with the composer at Glasgow Techtonics Festival, 2013

Not to mention the fundamentals: “And then there is the fact that it just covers the basics, the groceries, and gives you the time to spend on the process. To spend a morning developing the ideas, one needs the time even if the time is spent mulling things over and staring out of the window. On paper it doesn’t look like much, doesn’t look like anything, but it’s incredibly important.” It’s rare for artists to talk so practically about their process. While many feel comfortable talking about the need for ‘time and space’ to develop a practice, describing what that might actually look like, is less common.

Denyer is expansive on how the lack of value given to the liberal arts by wider society affects artists.

“We live in neoliberal times. Yet the humanities, arts, religion in many places, remind us what the essence of ‘living’ is about. This is why it’s difficult to talk about the role of artists. But we know we don’t want to live in a world without the arts, we know we believe in them. We have plenty of money relative to other countries, but what kind of society do we want? What do we think life is about? Art reminds us there is an alternative – it keeps hope alive. But it is challenging.”

Teaching has been at the heart of his practice for a long time, and he says it has been vital to stay in touch with young people and their ideas and what concerns them. “But composers have this tremendous choice to make. They need time to write music, and they need to make a living.” He describes his best experience at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, where he was a professor of Composition until the college merged with University College Falmouth in 2010. They gave him free reign not only over what to teach, but to take breaks as needed to go on tour, or finish a composition – they understood the value of having teachers with their own flourishing practice.

I ask him for his take on the expanding definition of ‘composer’ over recent decades, and the opening up of the music sector. His response reinforces his deep unease with the status quo, while shining a light on just how much has changed over the past five decades.

Early career

“I was taught at Guildhall in 1961 that music before Bach wasn’t of interest, and I’m relieved that the history of music has opened up enormously since then. The education I was brought up with was very euro-centric, almost entirely. After seven years of music college, I started travelling, and I was painfully aware that it hadn’t taught me anything about most of the world’s music. And I was mentally ill-equipped to process it. I decided that I needed to do something about it.”

And he did, spending significant time in the 70s first in northern India before undertaking a PhD at Wesleyan University in the USA in ethnomusicology, and then in Kenya. The impact of these studies on his subsequent musical output have been profound. Much of Denyer’s music is microtonal, and he is known for using a combination of conventional instruments and new, unusual, and structurally modified instruments from around the world, remaining resolutely independent of musical fashions and carving out a space for deep exploration of timbre and sound.

Frank Denyer, 1974. Photo credit: Eddie Franklin

However, Denyer believes the opening up of his field to be more inclusive of genres and disciplines also contains within it ‘a potential trap’: “If we accept populism tooth and claw, we must accept everything, but it’s not that simple – it’s terribly narrowing because it risks reducing everything to what’s useful to the commercial world.” He shudders as he recounts hearing a school teacher on the radio that morning saying he needed to prepare students for celebrity and having a public persona.

Time has certainly changed the definition of what a composer is, as well as who gets to be one and what the job entails. There’s no doubt Denyer’s musical travels across the world half a century ago were part of the avant garde leading those changes, and his recent releases testify that opening people’s ears to new ways of listening continues to take up a significant portion of his ‘staring out of the window’ time, to the benefit of us all.

Biography

Frank Denyer was born in London in 1943. His early musical training was as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, and he later studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London. In the late sixties he founded and directed the experimental ensemble Mouth of Hermes and with this group he premièred works by living composers as well as his own compositions, touring throughout Europe and Scandinavia. However, in the mid-70s he gave up performing temporarily to pursue interests in ethnomusicology. He received his PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in the USA and later became a Research Fellow in African Music at the University of Nairobi, working intensively with the music of the Plains Pokot. On his return to England in 1981 he joined Dartington College of Arts, becoming professor of composition and ethnomusicology in 1999.

CDs of his compositions have been released by Orchid, Continuum, Etcetera, Tzadik, and other labels. Particular mention might be made of A Monkey’s Paw (1991), Finding Refuge in the Remains (1999), Fired City (2002), Faint Traces (2005), Silenced Voices (2008), Music for Shakuhachi (2008) and Whispers (2015), Melodies (2021) and Screens (2022). Since 1990 Denyer performed widely with the Amsterdam based ensemble Barton Workshop. He has made recordings of both the solo piano music and ensemble works of Feldman, Ustvolskaya, Christian Wolff, and Jerry Hunt and many others.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 2019, rehearsing ‘The Fish that became the Sun’. Photo credit: Suhail Merchant

In 2012 he was commissioned jointly by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Orchestra to write an orchestral piece. It was titled The Colours of Jellyfish and was premiered in 2013 and later broadcast on BBC Radio 3. His large scale work The Fish that became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) from 1991–94 was premiered in the 2019 Huddersfield Festival by a vast array of players and singers all under the direction of Jonathan Hargreaves. The work was hailed as a masterpiece by the Times.

His book In the Margins of Composition was published by Vision Edition in 2019, and in 2020 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s award for large scale composition.

His most recent work includes four string quartets which have been designed for small audiences. They heavily mute the sound of the instruments of the usual string quartet, enabling an exploration of musical intimacy.

Frank Denyer

Impact of the Award

Early career

Biography

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