Fired City

CD of six of Denyer’s compositions – ‘Toward the Darkness’; ‘Beneath the Fired City’; ‘The Hanged Fiddler’; ‘Quick, Quick, the Tamberan is Coming’; ‘Resonances of Ancient Sins’; and ‘Prison Song’ – played by The Barton Workshop (Amsterdam), the KONTRA-Trio (Berne) and the Konink-Andiessen duo (Amsterdam). Five of the six pieces are première recordings.

In selecting the works for this CD Denyer included older compositions as well as new work in a deliberate attempt to shed light on what, in 2002, was his most recent music. The disc also manifests a specific research focus in that he was interested in exploring unusual or new instruments, such as the contrabass saxophone and the octobass flute, which had hardly (if ever) appeared before on commercial recordings. One of the works, ‘Beneath the Fired City’, has as its focus the search for new acoustic sound sources from “non-musical” objects such as paving stones, marbles and rulers; it is the outcome of an investigation into new percussive sources (all of which were specially built for this piece) and new playing techniques. Most of the works also involve new microtonal tunings and address related questions of performance practice and notation. Denyer’s involvement in this disc was through the roles of composer, co-director of the Barton Workshop, and conductor; he also guided the process of editing the recordings. Tzadik, based in New York, is largely devoted to improvised music and only a few composers working with musical notation, however unconventional, have featured on this label. The disc was listed in The Wire (December 2002) among one critic’s top 10 recordings of the year.