Frank Denyer: Melodies

London-born composer Frank Denyer has a long and varied career dating back to the 1960s. This two-disc album, released in plenty of time for his eightieth birthday on April 4th 2023, is the most recent of a dozen albums which have been released featuring his compositions, the first having beenWheat (Orchid, 1984) released on vinyl. Five of the six released since 2007 have been on Another Timbre, the first of those, Music for Shakuhachi having been that label's third release.

Melodies is an extended piece which Denyer composed between 1974 and 1977, triggered by his ethno- musicological studies in India, Japan and Kenya; he became interested in forms of traditional music made from just two, three or four notes which led him to the questions "What is a melody?" and "What is a note?" He decided to answer those questions by composing a series of short pieces, beginning with melodies for a single note, then for two notes, then three, leading all the way up to complex melodies for fourteen and fifteen notes, twenty-five tracks altogether, including four interludes between the composition's five parts; together those short pieces comprise the composition Melodies which is here recorded for the very first time, performed by Scoratura Ensemble, the Luna String Quartet, Mad Song and Denyer himself.

If it seems that one-note melodies could be repetitive or dull, in Denyer's hands the opposite is true of the three here. The first one is played on bamboo flute by Joe Zwaanenburg who extracts subtly different versions of the note from the instrument so that listeners seem sure to ask the question, "What is a note?" The second features Stefan Blonk on horn and Orlando Velazquez on stones so that, even without different notes, the two can conduct a dialogue or engage in call-and-response. For the third one-note piece, Zwaanenburg returns, this time with a C flute with membrane; as before he conjures different sounding variants of the note from it. Next up, three two- note melodies are even more diverse than those with one-note; the first one features sneh (a four-stringed bowed instrument designed by Denyer), voice and bamboo switch plus an uncredited bass drum, combining in a complex multi-faceted piece, while the second just features Denyer's voice alone. The third two- note piece is the most developed, with a musical form defined by two notes on double bass plus accompanying percussion instruments.

The charm of the album lies in the way the soundscape develops track upon track as the number of notes increases, without ever becoming over-crowded or cluttered. Although it can be fascinating to listen to Melodies from start to finish—almost one hundred minutes—many of its component pieces can be listened to and appreciated in their own right, on their own merits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this applies most to the final track's fourteen-note melody and fifteen note epilogue which exploits its notes to the full, combining them into nearly ten minutes of melodic music, a great finale to an outstanding album. Plaudits to Denyer and all concerned.