Michael Nyman

Michael Nyman (b London, 23 March 1944). English composer. He studied composition with Alan Bush at the RAM (1961–4) and musicology with Dart at King's College, London (1964–7).

He also spent time collecting folk music in Romania (1965–6). After showing early promise as a composer, he fell silent for almost a decade, during which he worked variously as an editor, librettist and performer, and as a music critic for The Spectator, The Listener and the New Statesman. It was in The Spectator in 1968 that he first applied the description ‘minimal’ to music, though the claim that he introduced the term to music criticism has been disputed (see Strickland, 241–4). Nyman's earliest work, dating from the mid-1970s, shows the influence of John Cage's aesthetics and the techniques of experimental and minimalist music, both of which he had charted in his book Experimental Music (London, 1974). For instance, the multiple piano piece 1–100 (1976) employs a series of 100 chords, descending gradually across the range of each piano part in a circle-of-fourths motion, to control both the note-to-note details and the overall form. Durations meanwhile are indeterminate, the performers proceeding through the music at their own pace.

Like many musicians associated with the English experimental movement, Nyman found himself teaching in fine art rather than music departments, holding posts (from the late 1960s) at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham University and Goldsmith's College, London. These liberating creative environments led him towards a tactile and intuitive approach to sound and timbre. Pre-existing materials form the basis of much of his early music, including In Re Don Giovanni (1977) and his first film scores for the director Peter Greenaway. While his use of quotation suggests parallels with the early work of Bryars and Christopher Hobbs, the techniques of layering, stratifying, reordering and superimposing that Nyman uses to transform his material more closely resemble those of film and popular music production. Also during this period he began to develop with an ensemble of his own the vibrant and uncompromising sound world of the ‘street band’ he had employed for the National Theatre's production of Goldoni's Il Campiello (1976). The Michael Nyman Band fused the abrasive, amplified timbres and motoric rhythms of rock with the string and brass writing of the classical tradition. For more than a decade, it provided Nyman with plenty of scope for timbral variety, dynamic flexibility and textural contrast, from the forthright articulation and rhythmic propulsion of the score for Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) to the gentle, understated textures of the chamber opera The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1986). Increasingly during the 1990s, however, Nyman sought ways in which to incorporate this sound into an extended orchestral context, or even, for instance in the Trombone Concerto (1995), to dispense with it altogether.

Whereas Nyman's compositions during the 1980s referred explicitly to the works of past composers, the works of the following decade were marked by a concern with self-quotation, in particular the reworking of materials drawn from film scores or other dramatic contexts into independent, large-scale concert pieces. The score for Prospero's Books (1990), itself partly derived from La traversée de Paris (1989), proved particularly fertile in this respect: it gave rise not only to a suite (1994), but also to Ariel Songs (1990–91), Masque Arias (1991) and parts of Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs (1994), otherwise based largely on La princesse de Milan (1989). The 1990s also saw a significant change in Nyman's style: a move towards a more intimate expressivity characterized by sustained and resonant textures, and a broader approach to melodic writing. Early examples are found in the more reflective moments of Prospero's Books (1990) and the subtle shifts of mood and emphasis in the Six Celan Songs (1990). Allied with this lyricism was an increasing gravitation towards folk music. In the String Quartet no.3 (1990) Nyman drew on the Romanian sources he had studied in the 1960s, while in the score for Jane Campion's The Piano (1992) a series of traditional Scottish melodies is subjected to melodic, rhythmic and harmonic transformations.

Though Nyman draws on his knowledge and experience of American minimalism, distinctive elements of his musical language set it apart from those influences. He has spoken of his more ‘intuitive’ approach to process, in which ‘the ear rather than the process is the initial and final arbiter’ (1977, p.7). Moreover, the prominence of the bass in his music, as well as suggesting the influence of rock, creates a harmonic stability and rootedness more characteristic of the European tonal tradition than of American minimalism. It is this often curious confluence of classical harmonic functions and rock rhythms and textures that provides Nyman's music with a rich and effective fusion of the codes of ‘high’ and popular art.