Denman Maroney composes and plays hyperpiano, which involves stopping, sliding, bowing, plucking, strumming and striking piano strings with various objects - bars, bowls, knives, bells, mashers of metal, boxes and bottles of plastic, mallets of various kinds and blocks of rubber - independently of or (more often) in conjunction with regular keyboard action. His polytemporal constructions involve articulating several pulses at once. Maroney has created a singular and very personal style of playing that's very much his alone." John Chacona, Signal To Noise.
Maroney has received grants from: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to compose for Medicine Show's productions of Jack Agueros' The Sea of Chairs and e.e. cummings' HIM, Yale Summer School of Music & Art (YSSMA) for a composer-in-residence fellowship, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for a Roulette commission, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) for a composition fellowship, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for a Tambastics commission, Jerome Robbins Foundation for a Nimbus Dance Theater commission, and Meet the Composer for a Gamelan Son of Lion commission.
Maroney has worked with many fine musicians including Tim Berne, Jane Ira Bloom, Jon Deak, Shelley Hirsch, John King, Garrett List, Roger Miller, Michael Moore, Bob Ostertag, William Parker, Bobby Previte, Herb Robertson, Mary Rowell, Mike Sarin, Ed Schuller, Elliot Sharp and Peter Zummo, and dance and theater artists Davidson Lloyd, Sin Cha Hong, Tom Keegan, Tom Lillard, Erin Martin, Wendy Osserman and Mel Wong. Maroney was educated at California Inst. of the Arts (MFA ’74), Bennington College and Williams College (BA ’71). His teachers included John Bergamo, Alan Chaplin, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Garrison, Leonid Hambro, Ingram Marshall, Steven Mosko, Morton Subotnick, James Tenney and Ki Wasitadipuro.
