Octandre Ensemble: The Open Fund for Organisations
The Octandre Ensemble will record a disc of works by Frank Denyer, spanning the last 50 years. Highlights include two pieces from the delicate, intimate ‘Unison’ series (1972-3), with its smoothly blended sonorities, and the more extrovert ‘Broken Music’ (1990), for flute, melodica, ‘cello, bassoon/contrabassoon, banjo, harp and two percussionists. The piece prefigures Denyer’s ‘The Fish that became the Sun’ (winner of the RPS Award for Large-Scale Composition Ensemble prize in 2020, premiered by Octandre Ensemble at HCMF 2019) in its rich palette, featuring numerous adapted and invented instruments (such as fishing rod, tin foil, marbles) or taken from other contexts (rabbit, crow and fox calls; beaked and shepherd’s mouth whistles). These will be premiere recordings of works by this unique and important voice within British music of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
Frank Denyer’s compositions fall between several and into none of the accepted categories of contemporary music. This music is handmade in every detail; it is engaged in a complex process of affirmation and negation, accepting no easy solutions. Denyer’s concern with musical instruments can be seen as a metaphor for the larger question of what can be salvaged, artistically, from the chaos of civilization as we are beginning our new century, confronting a central issue – the sense of new life emerging from a morass of dead or decaying matter. The Octandre Ensemble was formed in 2011. Our core repertoire is music written after 1945, with a focus on timbre and ritual.