Frank Denyer

Frank Denyer

Frank Denyer was born in London in 1943. His early musical training was asa chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and later as a pianist at the GuildhallSchool of Music in London. In the late sixties he founded and directed theexperimental ensemble Mouth of Hermes; through this group his owncompositions started to be heard in public in Britain and Europe. In themid-70s he gave up performing for a time to became a doctoral student inethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, with a specialinterest in Japanese music.

Finding life outside Europe to be of benefit in pursuing his compositionalideas, he became Research Fellow in African Music at the University ofNairobi from 1978-81, working intensively with the music of the Pokot.

Since his return to England in 1981 he has taught at Dartington College ofArts, where today he is Professor of Composition. Since 1990 Denyer hasperformed with the Barton Workshop: his recordings of the solo piano music and ensemble works of Morton Feldman, Galina Ustvolskaya, Christian Wolff and John Cage have met with wide acclaim.

There are three CDs of his music, A Monkey’s Paw (Continuum, 1991) and Finding Refuge in the Remains (Etcetera, 1999) and Fired City (Tzadik 2002). He has been described by David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet as a “fantastically interesting composer,” and by musicologist Wilfrid Mellers as a composer whose music “resembles no-one else’s…there can be no doubtthat it matters.”