Composers' Workshop: Frank Denyer

Each of Frank Denyer’s brilliantly coloured and imaginatively rich compositions is written for a unique combination of instruments - more often than not a combination that no composer has dreamed of before. His music presents an astonishingly varied array of sound sources – new instruments of his own invention, adapted instruments, instruments of non-Western traditions, rare or virtually extinct instruments, and conventional Western instruments. This concern with what his friend Morton Feldman called ‘the instrumental factor’ is not a postmodern mixing-and-matching of instruments from different ‘ethnic’ traditions: rather, his work suggests that all instruments bear the imprint of the tradition of which they are a part, and that at the beginning of the twenty-first century we cannot afford to be complacent about which musical traditions we consider to be ‘ours.’