This weekend, Frank Denyer’s hourlong work The Fish that became the Sun receives its premeire at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, some twenty-five years after it was composed. It goes a long way to addressing the lack of attention Denyer’s compositions have received, at home and abroad. Another Timbre has already recorded the work and released it to coincide with its live debut; having missed the gig, I intend to write about the disc shortly. The same label has also released a companion disc of shorter works, ranging from the mid-70s to last year, titled The Boundaries of Intimacy.
The title is appropriate, but not as much as the piece from which it is taken, a solo for flute with electronics named Beyond the Boundaries of Intimacy. Back in 2015, writing about Whispers, Another Timbre’s previous release of Denyer’s music, I was struck mostly by that intimate quality of his small-scale muisc. As with true intimacy, it can be confronting, painful, even frightening, especially when given freely as the music is offered here. The opening work Mother, Child and Violin gives us just that: small, private sounds uttered by a woman and a child with equally plain but elusive sounds from a violin. It feels almost voyeuristic; are mother and child making sounds to each other or each to themselves? That ambiguity gives a complexity to that intense relationship and how it may so often change. It’s a much more raw and human portrayal than the conventional, sentimental tableau implied by the title. The sounds are wordless.
All the compositions on this disc share an artlessness in the sounds and gestures; Denyer leaves any phrasing tenderly unformed, like a pre-verbal state of being. In each piece, the musicians seem to be exploring sound, but in a purely private sense as though for themselves – and perhaps immediate others. It is left to the listeners to presume whether they are part of the latter. That wordless state persists, intimacy in speaking through sound instead of through psychological confession. In this music, truth is found on the mythological level, even as it is retold, passed from composer to musician. Who speaks, the composer or the musician? Both and neither.
Talented and sympathetic musicians are needed to give this music its power. Juliet Fraser’s singing makes you think first of its directness and sincerity, with her technical skills evident only in closer analysis. Flautist and longtime Barton Workshop colleague Jos Zwaanenberg performs the title work, the only time Denyer has been persuaded to work with electronics. Zwaanenberg plays at the threshhold of audibility, given near-impossibly fine gradations in emphasis by the composer “between ppppppp and ppppp“. The electronics are almost imperceptible, serving to render the sounds as though without source. The sleeve notes (rare for an Another Timbre release) advise the listener to “imagine them performing intimately, without amplification, and often in an under-voice in order not to disturb the neighbours.”
Violist Elisabeth Smalt revives a solo work Denyer composed for a neglected string instrument he invented in 1980, and Nobutaka Yosjizawa plays both versions of a koto solo composed in 1975. In all of these pieces, the music becomes as dependent on sound as on the state of mind in which musician and listener find themselves. Unlike most compositions, this music cannot live inside one’s head, or on the page. It’s a kind of blessing to be able to hear them at last.
The most recent work, a String Quartet, receives a precarious performance by the Luna String Quartet. Frail sequences of notes rise and fall away, at times like one strange composite instrument very faint and far away, at others like lost, individual voices that never join together in force. Other sounds intrude, the musicians make unpolished vocalisations – wordless again. All four instruments are heavily mutes. This near-silence constrains a great, inner turmoil as the composition constantly strains the boundaries of expression and music. If music is art, how does this artform give voice to voiceless thought? Denyer’s quartet may well be the strangest in the genre, and the most disturbing.
[…] Timbre last year and has just been released to coincide with the concert. I’ve written about Denyer’s music before, but these were all briefer compositions for much smaller forces. The predominant tone in […]