British composer
Frank Denyer (born 1943) has always been a maverick, rejecting both doctrinaire modernism and traditional Western forms and ensembles. The most obvious influence on the works collected here is
Morton Feldman.
Denyer's music is sparse, focused on discrete sounds, almost always very quiet, and silence plays a critical element. Unlike
Feldman,
Denyer gives his pieces descriptive titles, like Ghosts Again and Tentative Thoughts, Silenced Voices, and his music is intentionally evocative. While
Feldman generally uses traditional Western instruments,
Denyer calls on his traditional instruments to employ extended techniques, and he uses a wide range of vocal and percussion sounds, a more varied palette than
Feldman's. The music is also spatially conceived, so a stereo reproduction can't fully capture the composer's intentions.
Denyer's love of individual sounds that only occasionally overlap is demonstrated by the fact that the texture of his solo piece Woman, Viola and Crow, in which the violist also vocalizes and makes percussion sounds, is not so very different from many parts of Two Beacons, which involves 30 performers. These performances, supervised by the composer, must be authoritative, but it seems inappropriate to evaluate them by conventional standards of classical music since he rarely calls for conventionally beautiful sounds. They're completely successful, though, in their haunting, meditative evocation of mysterious worlds. The CD should be of strong interest to fans of the experimentalist tradition, particularly
Feldman-esque minimalism.