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Artist
Frank Denyer
12+ albums
contemporary classicalcomposerbritishmicrotonaltzadik
about
Frank Denyer (born London, April 12 1943) is a British composer. His music uses a combination of conventional instruments and new, unusual, and structurally modified instruments. Partly due to his studies of non-Western music, much of Denyer's music is microtonal. Denyer was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and later studied at the Guildhall in London. In 1966 he co-founded, and was director of, the Society of Hermes, an arts club for new music, painting, poetry and theatre in Shepherds Bush, London. He formed and directed Mouth of Hermes, a professional instrumental ensemble devoted to new and experimental forms of music. He toured widely with the ensemble in Europe, Scandinavia and the U.K. in the years up to 1974, presenting new compositions. During this time he was Lecturer in Composition and 20th Century Studies at Hornsey College of Art. This early period culminated in his being a featured composer/performer at the Festival d’Orleans, France, in 1973. Denyer left the UK for a time in 1974 to begin what he calls his "musical travels", and to undertake his first attempts at ethnomusicological fieldwork (in west Asia and the Kulu Valley in north India). In the summer of 1974 he was a Visiting lecturer at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. Between 1974 and 1977 he was a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Thereafter he was Research Fellow in African Music at the Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, Keny
