Michael Nyman

2006 photo by David Gamble

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944, London) is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, perhaps best known for the many movie scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, and Love Counts, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist. Nyman has stated his preference for writing opera to other sorts of music.^[1]

Biography

Michael Nyman was born to a working class, secular, Jewish family in Stratford, East London who made their living assembling furs. He was raised in Chingford, North East London, and spent the time he was supposed to be going to bar mitzvah classes remaining on the bus and riding to St. Albans or Woolwich. He also collected bus tickets as a hobby (a plot point in Man and Boy: Dada). He was rejected from the Yardley Lane Primary School choir as a "tuneless growler", but his musical potential was observed by teacher Leslie Winters when he transferred to Sir George Monoux Grammar School. As the Nymans owned no musical instruments, Nyman spent copious time in the Winters household, and Leslie's brother, Geoffrey Winters, recommended Nyman to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he had studied with Alan Bush.^[2]

Nyman was accepted at the Royal Academy in September, 1961, and studied with Bush and Thurston Dart, focusing on piano and seventeenth century baroque music. He won the Howard Carr Memorial Prize for composition in July 1964.^[3] In 1969, he provided the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, Down by the Greenwood Side and directed the short film Love Love Love (based on, and identical length to, The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love"^[4]) before settling into music criticism, where he is generally acknowledged to have been the first to apply the term "minimalism" to music (in a 1968 article in The Spectator magazine about the English composer Cornelius Cardew). He wrote introductions for George Frideric Handel's Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 and conducted the most important interview with George Brecht in 1976.

Nyman, who had studied with the noted Baroque music scholar Thurston Dart at King's College London, drew frequently on early music sources in his scores for Greenaway's films: Henry Purcell in The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (which included Memorial and Miserere Paraphrase), Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber in A Zed and Two Noughts, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Drowning by Numbers, and John Dowland in Prospero's Books, largely at the request of the director.

Nyman says he discovered his aesthetic playing the aria, "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Mozart's Don Giovanni on his piano in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis, which "dictated the dynamic, articulation and texture of everything I've subsequently done."^[5]

Michael Nyman - Numbers

Nyman's popularity increased significantly after he wrote the score to Jane Campion's award-winning 1993 film The Piano. The album became a classical music best-seller. Although Nyman's score was central to the movie, he did not receive an Academy Award nomination despite being nominated for both a British Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He has scored numerous other films, the majority of them art films from Europe. His few forays into Hollywood composing have been Gattaca, Ravenous (with musician Damon Albarn), and The End of the Affair. He wrote settings to various texts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for "Letters, Riddles and Writs", part of Not Mozart. He has also produced a soundtrack for the silent film Man with the Movie Camera.

Among Nyman's better known non-film works are the opera Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs (1987), for soprano, alto, tenor and instrumental ensemble (based on Nyman's score for the ballet La Princesse de Milan); Ariel Songs (1990) for soprano and band; MGV (Musique à Grande Vitesse) (1993) for band and orchestra; concertos for saxophone, piano (based on The Piano score), violin, harpsichord, trombone, and saxophone & cello recorded by John Harle and Julian Lloyd Webber; the opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), based on a case-study by Oliver Sacks; and four string quartets. Recently, he produced a new opera on the subject of cloning on a libretto by Victoria Hardie titled Facing Goya, an expansion of their one-act opera Vital Statistics. The lead, a widowed art banker, is written for contralto and the role was first created by Hilary Summers. His newest operas are Man and Boy: Dada (2003) and Love Counts (2005), both on libretti by Michael Hastings.

On children's television shows, he has created the music for Katie and Orbie and Titch.

Michael Nyman

Many of Nyman's works are written for his own ensemble, the Michael Nyman Band, a group formed for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello. Originally made up of old instruments such as rebecs and shawms alongside more modern instruments like the saxophone in order to produce as loud a sound as possible without amplification, it later switched to a fully amplified lineup of string quartet, three saxophones, trumpet, horn, bass trombone, bass guitar and piano. This line up has been variously altered and augmented for some works.

Nyman also published an influential book in 1974 on experimental music called Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Catalan, Spanish and French translations), which explored the influence of John Cage on classical composers. In the 1970s, Nyman was a member of the infamous Portsmouth Sinfonia — the self-described World's Worst Orchestra — playing on their recordings and in their concerts. He was the featured pianist on the orchestra's recording of Bridge Over Troubled Waters on the Martin Lewis-produced 20 Classic Rock Classics album on which the Sinfonia gave their unique interpretations to the pop and rock repertoire of the 1950s-1970s. Nyman created a similar group called Foster's Social Orchestra, which specialized in the work of Stephen Foster. One of their tracks appeared in the film Ravenous and an additional track, not used in the film, appeared on the soundtrack album.

He has also recorded pop music, with the Flying Lizards; a version of his Bird List from the soundtrack to Peter Greenaway's The Falls appears on their album Fourth Wall under the title "Hands 2 Take."

On 7 July 2007 Nyman performed at Live Earth in Japan.

Personal life

He is married to Aet Nyman and has two daughters, Molly and Martha. His first string quartet quotes "Unchained Melody" in homage to Aet, who appears in Greenaway's The Falls, for which he also composed music. Molly is a composer in her own right; in collaboration with Harry Escott she has written several film scores including for The Road to Guantanamo by her father's frequent collaborator, Michael Winterbottom. Martha is a development researcher for the BBC. Michael Nyman supports Queens Park Rangers football club.

Nyman and Aet separated, and Nyman was publicly humiliated over a brief relationship started on MySpace with Jane Slavin.^[6]

Career highlights

• 1961-67 - Studies at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College London.
• 1968-78 - Works as music critic (becoming first person to apply the word "minimalist" to music).
• 1976 - Founds the Campiello Band (now the Michael Nyman Band) and embarks on eleven-film collaboration with Peter Greenaway.
• 1981 - Releases first Michael Nyman Band album.
• 1993 - Soundtrack for The Piano wins an Ivor Novello Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and American Film Institute award and goes on to sell over three million copies.
• 2002-2005 - Composer-in-Residence at Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany, who performed three Nyman operas and more tunes for his daughters.
• 2007 - Performed on 7 July from Kyoto, Japan as part of the Live Earth global environmental awareness musical event.

Honours

Nyman was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.^[7]

Nyman was awarded an honorary doctorate (DLitt) from The University of Warwick on 30th January 2007. At the ceremony The University of Warwick Brass Society and Chamber Choir, conducted by Paul McGrath, premiered a specially composed procession and recession fanfare composed by Nyman.[2]

Works

• 1963 - Introduction and Allegro Concertato for Wind Quartet (lost)
• 1963 - Divertimento for Flute, Oboe and Clarinet
• 1965 - Canzona for Flute
• 1974 - Bell Set No. 1 (multiple metal percussion)
• 1976 - 1-100 (4-6 pianos)
• 1976 - (First) Waltz in D (variable)
• 1976 - (Second) Waltz in F (variable)
• 1977 - In Re Don Giovanni (ensemble)
• 1978 - The Otherwise Very Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz (multiple pianos)
• 1979 - "The Masterwork" Award Winning Fish-Knife (ensemble)
• 1980 - A Neat Slice of Time (choir)
• 1981 - Think Slow, Act Fast (ensemble)
• 1981 - Five Orchestral Pieces for Opus willi (band*) (based on Anton Webern's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 10)
• 1981 - M-Work (band)
• 1981 - 2 Violins
• 1982 - Four Saxes (Real Slow Drag) (saxophone quartet)
• 1983 - A Handsome, Smooth, Sweet, Smart, Clear Stroke: Or Else Play Not At All (orchestra)
• 1983 - Time's Up (chamber ensemble)
• 1983 - I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump (electric violin and viola, both players also simultaneously singing)
• 1983 - Love is Certainly, at Least Alphabetically Speaking (soprano and band)
• 1984 - The Abbess of Andouillets (choir)
• 1985 - Nose-List Song (soprano and orchestra) [this and the above three works are from an unfinished opera setting of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which Nyman has repeatedly cited as his all-time favorite book]
• 1985 - Childs Play (2 violins; harpsichord)
• 1985 - String Quartet No. 1
• 1986 - Taking a Line for a Second Walk (for orchestra (Basic Black) or piano duet)
• 1986 - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (opera; libretto by Christopher Rawlence; adapted from the Oliver Sacks case study by Nyman, Rawlence, and Michael Morris)
• 1986 - And Do They Do (modern dance, 1986)
• 1987 - Vital Statistics (opera; libretto by Victoria Hardie)
• 1988 - String Quartet No. 2
• 1989 - Out of the Ruins (choir)
• 1989 - La Traversée de Paris (soprano and band)
• 1989 - The Fall of Icarus (band)
• 1989 - L'Orgie Parisienne Arthur Rimbaud setting (soprano or mezzo soprano and orchestra)
• 1990 - Shaping the Curve (soprano saxophone, string quartet or piano)
• 1990 - Six Celan Songs (contralto and orchestra)
• 1990 - Polish Love Song (soprano and piano)
• 1990 - String Quartet No. 3
• 1991 - The Michael Nyman Songbook A collection of songs based on texts by Paul Celan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare, and Arthur Rimbaud and recorded with vocalist Ute Lemper.
• 1991 - Where the Bee Dances (soprano saxophone and orchestra)
• 1991 - Fluegelhorn and Piano
• 1992 - Time Will Pronounce (violin, cello, and piano)
• 1992 - For John Cage (brass ensemble)
• 1992 - Self-Laudatory Hymn of Inanna and Her Omnipotence (alto and string orchestra or countertenor and viol consort)
• 1992 - The Convertibility of Lute Strings (solo harpsichord)
• 1992 - Anne de Lucy Songs (soprano and piano)
• 1992 - The Upside-Down Violin (orchestra/ensemble)
• 1993 - MGV: Musique à grande vitesse (band and orchestra)
• 1993 - The Piano Concerto (piano and orchestra)
• 1993 - Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs (1993; opera-ballet setting William Shakespeare's The Tempest)
• 1993 - Yamamoto Perpetuo (violin solo)
• 1993 - Songs for Tony (saxophone quartet)
• 1994 - To Morrow (soprano or soprano saxophone, organ)
• 1994 - 3 Quartets (ensemble)
• 1994 - Concerto for Trombone (trombone, orchestra, and steel filing cabinets)
• 1995 - String Quartet No. 4
• 1995 - Tango for Tim (In memoriam Tom Suster) (harpsichord)
• 1995 - The Waltz Song (unison voices)
• 1995 - Viola and Piano
• 1995 - Grounded (mezzo-soprano, saxophones, violin, piano)
• 1995 - HRT [High Rise Terminal] (chamber ensemble)
• 1995 - Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings
• 1995 - Double Concerto for Saxophone and Cello (saxophone, cello, and orchestra)
• 1996 - After Extra Time (ensemble)
• 1997 - Strong on Oaks, Strong on the Causes of Oaks (orchestra)
• 1997 - The Promise (piano)
• 1998 - Cycle of Disquietude (Coisas, Vozes, Lettras) (soprano, mezzo-soprano, and band)
• 1998 - Orfeu (band)
• 1998 - De Granada A La Luna (band)
• 1999 - The Commissar Vanishes (band)
• 2000 - Facing Goya (opera; libretto by Victoria Hardie)
• 2001 - a dance he little thinks of (orchestra)
• 2003 - Violin Concerto (violin and orchestra)
• 2003 - Man and Boy: Dada (opera; libretto by Michael Hastings)
• 2005 - Love Counts (opera; libretto by Michael Hastings)
• 2006 - gdm for Marimba and Orchestra (concerto)
• 2006 - Acts of Beauty' (song cycle)
• 2007 - A Handshake in the Dark (choral piece with orchestra; text by Jamal Jumá [world premiere 8 March 2007, Barbican, London, performed by the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, John Storgards conducting])
• 2007 - Interlude in C (expansion of a theme from The Libertine for Accent07 touring ensemble)
• 2007 - Eight Lust Songs song cycle

*originally recorded by Nyman, Ned Sublette, Susan Krongold, Barbara Benary, Jon Gibson, Richard Cohen, Virgil Blackwell, Peter Zummo, and Peter Gordon at The Kitchen, and intended for Peter Greenaway's short film, The Tree.

Music for films, television, and video games

• Tree (1966)
• 5 Postcards from Capital Cities (1967)
• Goole by Numbers (1976)
• Keep It Up Downstairs (1976)
• Tom Phillips (1977)
• A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)
• Vertical Features Remake (1978)
• 1-100 (1978)
• The Falls (1980)
• Act of God (1980)
• Terence Conran (1981)
• The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)
• Brimstone & Treacle (1982) (collaboration with Sting)
• Nelly's Version (1983)
• The Coastline (1983)
• Making a Splash (1984)
• The Cold Room (1984)
• Fairly Secret Army (1984)
• A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
• The Kiss (1985)
• Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire, 1985 (1985)
• L'Ange frénétique (1985)
• Ballet mécanique (1986 score; 1921 film)
• I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump (1986)
• The Disputation (1986)
• Le Miraculé (1987)
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987)
• Fear of Drowning (1988)
• Death in the Seine (1988)
• Drowning by Numbers (1988)
• Out of the Ruins (1989)
• Hubert Bals Handshake (1989)
• Monsieur Hire (1989)
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
• La Sept (1989)
• Men of Steel (1990)
• Les Enfants volants (1990)
• The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)
• Ich war ein glücklicher Mensch (1991)
• Prospero's Books (1991)
• Not Mozart: Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991)
• The Fall of Icarus (1992)
• The Final Score (1992)
• The Piano (1993)
• Mesmer (1994)
• À la folie (1994)
• Anne No Nikki (Japanese anime adaption of The Diary of Anne Frank) (1995)
• Carrington (1995)
• The Ogre (1996)
• Enemy Zero (1996)
• Anzar (1997)

• Gattaca (1997)
• Titch (1998)
• Practical Magic (1998) (unused score; 2 cuts made it onto early soundtrack pressings)
• Ravenous (1999) (collaboration with Damon Albarn)
• Wonderland (1999)
• Nabbie's Love (1999)
• The End of the Affair (1999)
• Act Without Words I (2000)
• The Claim (2000)
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929 film; 2001 score)
• Subterrain (2001)
• Haute fidélité (2001)
• 24 Heures de la vie d'une femme (2001)
• The Actors (2003)
• Nathalie... (2003)
• Luminal (2004)
• The Libertine (2004)
• Jestem (2005)
• A Cock and Bull Story (2006) (original arrangement of George Frideric Handel's "Sarabande"; re-used recordings from The Draughtsman's Contract)
• Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (2007)
• Never Forever (2007)

Nyman's music re-used

• Nyman's "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" (from The Piano) was used as backing music for one of the bank advertisements for Lloyds TSB broadcast on television. It has also been featured in episodes of 20/20.
• "Sheep & Tides" (from Drowning by Numbers) was featured in a commercial in which a woman smashes a man's car.
• Music from Ravenous has been used at least once on WFYI's Across Indiana, in a segment titled "On the Trail of John Hunt Morgan", produced by Scott Andrew Hutchins.
• Nyman's soundtrack for Carrington is mostly based on his own String Quartet No. 3.
• A Cock and Bull Story contains music from The Draughtsman's Contract, as well as Nyman's arrangements of classical music used in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (it does not use any music from Nyman's Tristram Shandy opera).
• Nyman's music for Peter Greenaway's films has been used in the Japanese television program Iron Chef.
• Popular "Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds" (from The Draughtsman's Contract) constituted the main theme of Spanish TV program Queremos Saber, presented by Mercedes Milà in the nineties.
• Nyman features in '9 Songs' (Michael Winterbottom, 2004) playing at the Hackney Empire on his 60th birthday.
• Nyman's MGV: Musique à grande vitesse was used in November 2006 for a new 1-act ballet for the Royal Ballet in London, DGV (danse à grande vitesse) by Christopher Wheeldon.
• Nyman's "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" was covered by the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish. Nyman refused it to be released.
• Time Lapse was used in Sky's 2008 'Heroes' advert
• Selections from Nyman's catalogue formed part of the soundtrack for James Marsh's 2008 documentary, Man on Wire, a film about Philippe Petit, a Frenchman, who in 1974 illegally strung a tightrope between the top of the WTC buildings and danced between them for 45 minutes, thus committing the "artistic crime of the 20th century".

Selected recordings

• Man and Boy: Dada - MN Records 102
• The Very Best of Michael Nyman: Film Music 1980-2001 - Virgin EMI CDVED957
• String Quartets 1-3 - Decca 4730912
• Decay Music EMI CVE964 2004

Footnotes

External links

• Michael Nyman official site
• Michael Nyman's homepage at Chester Music
• Michael Nyman at the Internet Movie Database
• Michael Nyman at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• The Power of the Cadence: Michael Nyman in conversation with Robert Davidson
• 'The Case Against Nyman Revisited' Recent article on Michael Nyman's use of pre-existing music

Listening

• Michael Nyman audio at Internet Archive