Obit. | Wikipedia | Story from Rick
Dennis' Obituary:
Central Vermont lost one of its most creative community members recently with the passing of Dennis Murphy of Plainfield. Dennis was an artist, a photographer, a musician, a composer, a scholar, and an extraordinary teacher and mentor who influenced generations of students.
Though Dennis could (literally) blow many horns, he avoided anything that smacked of self-promotion and was happiest living quietly with his family and being creative in any number of ways. Some might be surprised to learn that he was a nationally known expert on Indonesian music and is credited with building the first set of Javanese gamelan instruments in the United States.
Murphy was a professor of music and ethnomusicology at Goddard College for many years, and more recently taught at the Governor’s Institute on the Arts in their summer program. He received his M.A. in composition from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he began his work with Javanese gamelan music. He studied Chinese brush stroke painting and watercolors while at Goddard and received an M.F.A. in visual arts. His paintings and photographs have been shown in galleries throughout the area - his last art show was this past July at the Blinking Light Gallery in Plainfield, where he displayed some of his most recent works painted after he suffered a serious stroke in December of 2008.
Dennis also could be seen frequently performing with the Nisht Geferlach Klezmer Band, the Plainfield Village Gamelan (for which he built all the instruments and composed most of the music), and with the trio Still Friends (with Geoff Hewitt and Chuck Meese). He always added his own remarkable touch to every group he performed with, whether with his haunting bassoon, his witty and whimsical songs, his lovely Irish tenor voice, his hollow and ethereal flute playing on his own homemade flutes made out of pvc from the local hardware store – he could make everything sound beautiful and somehow right.
Dennis was perhaps best known in the central Vermont region for his ‘operina’, “A Perfect Day”, composed in 1993 and performed originally by the Onion River Chorus with a small orchestra accompanying. Later the piece was adapted and performed by the Fyre and Lightning Consort with guests Roger Grow, tenor, and Rick Winston, keyboard, and the group recorded the complete cantata in 1998. Of this piece, Dennis wrote, “It may at first be a matter for puzzlement that this work rockets back and forth between the comic and the serious – but what else could it do? It’s about life, and life is exactly like that. …it’s about the middle of springtime, mid-morning, an odd sort of brilliant sky-blue light, chicken-minded human behavior, the fun of playing with words as pure sound, and a seldom-to-be-recaptured joy and wonder in simply existing”.
There will be a musical tribute to Dennis on Sunday, January 23 at 2 PM at the Plainfield Town Hall. It will feature performances by some of the groups in which Dennis participated: the Plainfield Village Gamelan, Still Friends, the Nisht Geferlach Klezmer Band, and the Fyre and Lightning Consort, which will perform several selections from Dennis' "operina," "A Perfect Day."