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 ...
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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...
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