Frank Denyer creates works that are intimate and unusual

A snail shell . . . a smooth paving stone . . . a sardine can. These are among the unorthodox instruments English composer Frank Denyer uses in his music.

On Monday night at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, the new-music series Monday Evening Concerts presents the premiere of Denyer’s “Out of the Shattered Shadows 2,” along with the U.S. premieres of his “Hanged Fiddler” and “Woman, Viola and Crow.”

“I’m looking for a tone of voice with little rhetoric,” Denyer, 67, said recently over breakfast in Little Tokyo, understating the deep intimacy of a sound world created by such things as mango seeds, bones and even moth cocoons.

“I find things that are more modest in terms of their capabilities, and because it’s a small voice, it tends to draw people in.”

Though Denyer’s exotic instruments are much smaller than those made by California composer Harry Partch, he’s aware of the theatrical atmosphere they convey. “It’s a tremendous help to have unusual objects on the stage, because people wonder what they will sound like. They pay attention. If you hear a string quartet or a rock band, you’re only interested in what they do with the sound. You’re not responding to the quality of the sound.”

Indeed, Denyer, rehearsing with the Monday Evening Concerts musicians, pays precise attention to matters of articulation and timbre. Marc Lowenstein, one of the singers in “Out of the Shattered Shadows 2,” initially called the experience “truly maddening.” It took some patience before he was convinced that Denyer meant what he wrote and actually heard the difference between one tiny sound and another.

Of the special vocal effects and whistling-breathing that the score requires, Lowenstein said, “It’s an aesthetic of quiet, drawing an audience into these extremely personal moments. The effect is a ghostly, finely grained amorphous shadow out of which a melody attempts to grow. Denyer asks what happens to humans at the base of silence.”

Percussionist Amy Knoles, who also performs in “Shadows,” agrees that Denyer is very precise. “Each sound has to come from inside me,” she says, adding that this intimate piece, which may “suggest a past emotion or memory from time to time,” is almost too personal to perform before an audience.

But Knoles says the score is also fun. “I’ve never played on this big of a wooden box before,” she says, referring to an instrument built for “Shadows.” “I’m enjoying the wild distance in dynamics I get to explore, and I’ve also never played the bones. How many instruments are small enough to carry in your purse?”

Denyer has his critics. Once, after a performance of “Woman, Viola and Crow,” a listener told him, “That’s not music. That’s . . . radio play.”

“I understood where he was coming from,” Denyer said. “In the piece, the woman has to play viola and sing. She wears special shoes and a jacket with shells on it that works as a percussion instrument. On top of all this, she has to imitate the sound of a crow.”

Denyer, who lives in Devon, England, where he’s professor of composition at Dartington College of Arts and studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, seems to turn a person into a ritual instrument. “It started with the idea of a fragile voice,” he said. The viola, voice, shoes and percussion act to keep a thread of sound alive, to “just save it from collapsing.”

For Denyer, the rest is silence. “We’re so overloaded by stuff,” he said. “We want to make meaning, partly because we can’t stop the terrifying thought that our lives may be meaningless. People like John Cage and Samuel Beckett are heroic figures. They show us we can face this and come through to the other side.”

As a student, Denyer looked to American composers “as a way to escape the clutches of the European avant-garde, which seemed a cul-de-sac.” Cage was a major influence, and so was Morton Feldman, who worked with Beckett. “Feldman influenced me as a person,” Denyer said. “He came to Europe every year, but he was outside the scope of musicologists and the establishment, and that was very attractive to me.”

Some may consider Denyer a radical voice, but as the fragments of tunes in his work attest, he never gave up on melody. “When I was a student, if you spoke about melody, you were a real stick-in-the-mud conservative,” he said. “But there are ways of being radical and unusual melodically. If we reduce everything, what is left? What is the core of our memory? We’ve grown accustomed to people shouting at us. Maybe a useful contribution is to develop a smaller voice and look at the fragility of human life.”

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