Michael Nyman

Among contemporary classical composers, Michael Nyman is one of the most widely recognized by the general public. He owes much of this visibility to his film scores, particularly for director Peter Greenaway (thirteen films in nearly twenty-five years), and for Jane Campion’s The Piano, which won the Palm d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. The film’s main theme, like Ludwig van Beethoven’s Für Elise, has become a staple for beginner pianists.

In this respect, Nyman is perhaps closest to Philip Glass, another leading and widely recognized figure in experimental music. Beyond their shared preference for tonal harmonic progressions, a steady pulse, and repetition — features common to much experimental music composition — both Nyman and Glass have written extensively for film, shown a sustained interest in canonic genres such as the symphony, concerto, string quartet, and opera, maintained close ties to popular music (notably through Brian Eno), and reused material from their own earlier works.

However, Nyman’s artistic path and his self-positioning in the European art-music tradition remains highly original. His work unfolds between two poles: his intimate engagement with music of the past and a deep interest in popular music and experimentation. The fact that his career started with a long and fruitful period as a music critic, and that he came to prominence as a composer through film, only heightens the originality of his place within the music scene and supports his characterization as a postmodern composer.

Although postmodernism can be a slippery term when applied to composers, it seems apt for Nyman’s oeuvre.¹ First, Nyman’s approach to composition is postmodern in its intertextual relationship to the past. As he underlines, an essential element of his process involves “the reconstruction, renovation, renarration, refocusing, revitalization, rearrangement or just plain rewriting” of preexisting music, whether the works of earlier composers or his own.² Second, in Nyman’s work the boundaries between high and low culture, as well as rigid categorizations of artistic disciplines, give way to a more porous approach. (In this sense, since 2010s, Nyman has increasingly established himself as a cinematographer in his own right).

These two aspects of Nyman’s approach to composition — his intertextual relationship to preexisting works and his general loosening of rigid disciplinary and hierarchical boundaries — are addressed as the core of this essay. Other parts of this essay investigate how the eight years he spent working as a music critic led him to music composition, and how that work impacted his musical style. Although Nyman’s often draw on preexisting material, his style is unmistakably his own, characterized by melodic inventiveness, polyrhythmic vitality, and driving energy. Beneath this deceptive regularity lie almost kitschy shifts articulation, texture, and harmony. These elements, combined with Nyman’s love of lists, collections, and conceptual games (all rather modernist traits), as well as his sure taste for humor and irony (he has dedicated an entire opera to the dadaist Kurt Schwitters and a piece to the Fluxus artist George Brecht), have shaped what might be best described as his romantic minimalist style, or, put differently, his own traditional post-minimalism.³

From Music Critic to Musician

Much like the filmmakers of the French New Wave, Nyman perfected his art by writing about the work of others. After his student years as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music — where he studied with Alan Bush (a close associate of Bertolt Brecht), Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill, whose own works often refer to formal structures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — followed by musicological training at King’s College with Thurston Dart, Nyman did not feel ready to embark on a career as a composer.

After publishing his first article — on [Olivier Messiaen]’s (https://ressources.ircam.fr/composer/olivier-messiaen/biography) Turangalîla-Symphonie — in The Spectator, he embarked on a fruitful career as a music critic. He was the first writer to use the term minimalism to describe music (in 1968, in an article on the Danish composer Henning Christiansen), and the first European to interviewe Steve Reich (in 1970). His experience as a critic helped him clarify his position on the Western contemporary music scene, then dominated by the Darmstadt avant-garde. Skeptical of the serial dogma and its complexity, Nyman contrasted Western art-music composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen with experimental composers in the line of John Cage, who were more open to elements outside the tradition of Western notated music. From then on, he took up their cause. He considered the music of La Monte Young and Cornelius Cardew to be more generous, newer, and more political, in that it embraced the social construction of art and challenged notions established since the early nineteenth century, chief among them the autonomy of the artwork, what musicologist Lydia Goehr has called the Beethovenian paradigm.

In his early years, Nyman was close to the New Music Manchester group, founded by Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, both of whom were keen on reviving and paraphrasing pre-Renaissance music. In the early 1970s, he joined two ensembles, Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and Gavin Bryars’s Portsmouth Sinfonia, where he rubbed shoulders with musicians such as Christopher Hobbs, Howard Skempton and Brian Eno. In these contexts, he experimented with new ways of playing and composing music, breaking down the pyramidal structure of the orchestra and the divide between professional and amateur musicians. During the same period, he also experimented with synthesizers and tape.

In 1974, he published a comprehensive book, Experimental Music, in which he synthesized his thoughts.⁴ He reinforced these ideas in 1980 with one of his later articles, unapologetically entitled “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music,” where he contrasts

“an avant-garde whose intellectual complex music builds on [...] traditional compositional techniques and concepts and, on the other, experimental music, in which apparent straightforwardness and lack of notated complexity derives from principles alien to European music, at least since 1600.”⁵

Experience as a critic gave Nyman the spark he needed to create. His first album, 1-100, released in 1976 on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, echoes the kind of experimental works he had championed in his writing. The album consists of a single piece, roughly one hour long, in which four pianists play the same descending sequence of one hundred chords, modulating according to a neighboring-tone system characteristic of the Baroque period. While each player reads from the same written sequence of descending chords, they do so at their own pace: a new chord may be played only when the resonance of the preceding one has faded. The effect is hypnotic and recalls the stasis found in pieces by Morton Feldman. 1-100 was composed (but not used) for a short film by Greenaway, a young filmmaker with whom Nyman had collaborated since the mid-1960s.

Composing Intertextuality

The year 1976 was, in Nyman’s own words, the year of his renaissance as a composer. Fellow composer Harrison Birtwistle, then music director of the Royal National Theatre in London, commissioned him to arrange Venetian folk songs for Carlo Goldoni's play Il Ciampello. This project led to the creation of the Ciampello Band, soon renamed the Michael Nyman Band, which combined early instruments (rebec, sackbut, chalumeau) with modern ones (banjo, saxophone), allowing Nyman to explore a wide range of experiments.

The first piece he wrote for the ensemble, In Re Don Giovanni, served as a kind of manifesto. The three-minute piece is based on a fifteen-bar sequence from the aria Madamina, il catalogo è questo in Mozart's Don Giovanni, reworked at a fast tempo and in an almost pop style reminiscent of Wendy Carlos’s arrangements for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. That same year, Nyman composed The Otherwise Very Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz, working with a cumulative process used by Frederic Rzewski for his piece Les Moutons de Panurge (1969) and applying it to the first thirty-two measures of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube.

In 1981 for his Five Orchestral Pieces for Opus Tree, Nyman revisited music he had written for Greenaway’s 1966 short film Tree, itself inspired by Anton Webern’s [Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10] (https://ressources.ircam.fr/work/cinq-pieces-1971-01-01).The following year, his score for Greenaway’s first feature film, The Draughtman’s Contract, was popular success. Drawing on his archival research on Henry Purcell and George Frederick Handel, Nyman based the film’s music on Baroque ostinati, transforming them through a minimalist aesthetic that borders on pop.

Nyman often turned to Baroque music as source material for his compositions: Purcell for the score of Greenaway’s 1989 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and for his Trombone Concerto (1995), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber for Patrice Leconte’s 1989 Monsieur Hire, and John Bull for his String Quartet No. 1 (1985). But later music has also served as inspiration: Frédéric Chopin’s music (combined with Scottish folk songs) in The Piano, Johannes Brahms in Monsieur Hire, and Arnold Schoenberg in his String Quartet No. 1.

Mozart, too, provided material for many of Nyman’s pieces. Noteworthy is the score for Greenaway’s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers, which is based on the andante from the Symphonie concertante, K. 364. The film’s opening piece, Trysting Fields, uses all the appoggiaturas from Mozart’s score, repeating them three times. Nyman had already drawn on the Symphonie concertante for Greenaway’s 1979 film The Falls, where he isolated a brief five-chord sequence (from bars 58 to 62) that, in this new context, takes on an almost doo-wop quality.

This last example illustrates Nyman’s distinctive way of reusing existing music. He begins by isolating a pattern and extracting certain features from it: its symmetry, for instance, or its staccato articulation. He then transforms the pattern into a loop that, while retaining its tonal center, gradually alters the original texture and harmonic syntax through rhythmic shifts.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his music, Nyman brings into play a variety of techniques for incorporating preexisting material. Sometimes the borrowed material is integrated into the body of the work; at others, it is placed in clear juxtaposition to emphasize an aesthetic dissonance. Beyond these structural uses, Nyman also draws on the dramatic potential of preexisting music. One striking example is Robert Schumann’s lied Ich grolle nicht, which in Nyman’s opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — based on a book of the same name by neurologist Oliver Sacks — slowly loses its tonal center to match the protagonist’s mental collapse. Nyman uses a similar metaphorical approach in his opera Love Counts (2005), where he integrates J.S. Bach’s 371 harmonized chorales by fragmenting, accelerating, slowing, and juxtaposing them to reflect the heroine’s mental state. Another example of quotation is his multimedia work War Work: 8 Songs with Film (2014), where Nyman sets war poems to music that draws from Orlando Gibbons, John Bull, Chopin, César Franck, and Franz Schubert.

Nyman’s approach differs radically from neoclassical pastiche, as well as from the citation and collage techniques employed by composers from the 1960s such as Luciano Berio, Alfred Schnittke, and Arvo Pärt in his early period. Instead, Nyman’s music combines elements of modernist structure with postmodern freedom, drawing on the innovations of Cage, American minimalism, and British experimentalism. For Nyman, who once remarked that he gets “all his musical kicks and ideas from the European symphonic tradition,” this approach serves as a way to assert his heritage.⁶

According to musicologist Jean-Pierre Dambricourt, Nyman’s music “turns its models into signifiers of a lost object whose desire and mourning it dramatizes.” It “takes note, not without nostalgia, of the irretrievable removal of any stable frame of reference,” including “the sense of history.”⁷ Dambricourt’s view resonates with that of musicologist Maarten Beirens, who observes that Nyman’s oeuvre reads as a “who’s who in Western music history [...] entering into an ongoing dialogue with music history” through which Nyman affirms his European identity and his connection to tradition.⁸

In this vein, one can recall a scene from his television opera Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), an eccentric yet programmatic work composed for the bicentenary of Mozart’s death. Mozart, sung by the mezzo-soprano Ute Lemper, appears in the form of a bust to discuss Carl Czerny with musicologist Hans Georg Nägeli (1773-1836). By projecting his characters some two hundred years into the future, Nyman casts new light on music of the past and claims his own position within that lineage.

This intertextuality also applies within Nyman’s own works, which often grow out of earlier compositions. The score for The Piano, for example, provided the material for his Piano Concerto (1994). He reworked several pieces from La Traversée de Paris — a fresco-like score composed for an exhibition at the Grande Arche de La Défense commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution — into two later works inspired by Shakespeare’s * The Tempest*: the music for Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books and the opera-ballet Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, created with choreographer Karine Saporta.

His opera Facing Goya (2000) derives from Vital Statistics 1987, an earlier opera on the theme of physiognomy. Symphony No. 11, “Hillsborough Memorial” (2014), composed as a tribute to the ninety-six victims of the 1999 Hillsborough stadium tragedy in Sheffield, reworks Memorial, a funeral march Nyman composed in 1985 after the Heysel stadium tragedy in Brussels.

Nyman’s oeuvre is thus an ongoing process of revision and transformation, with few truly autonomous scores. One exception is his String Quartet No. 5 (2011), his first work not to rely on preexisting material. Nyman might well be the “guardian of the forgotten” as composer Robert Worby describes him in the preface to Pwyll ap Siôn’s book The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts.

Nyman, a Pop Artist

If the line between art and popular music now seems increasingly blurred, Nyman deserves credit for being among the first composers to show a genuine interest in the popular. In this light, his decision to present his ensemble as a band is far from incidental. The second album he recorded with the Michael Nyman Band —Michael Nyman (1981), produced by composer David Cunningham for his Piano Records label — offers the clearest example of his sensitivity to the melodies and rhythms of popular music. It includes several pieces composed for Greenaway’s films, including the rock-inflected Bird List Song from the mock documentary The Falls. The following year, the piece was covered as Hands 2 Take by the Flying Lizards, an experimental pop band led by Cunningham and featuring figures from the British experimental music scene such as Steve Beresford and David Toop. Also included on the album is In Re Don Giovanni, a piece that Nyman came up with while playing Mozart’s aria Madamina, il catalogo è questo in the exuberant style of Jerry Lee Lewis. The piece was released as a 45 RPM single — an unusual move for an art-music composer — by the hip Brussels label Les Disques du Crépuscule and included a Webern-inspired B-side. The album also features musicians from the free jazz scene, such as saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker.

Unsurprisingly, Nyman’s first fans came from the burgeoning new wave and experimental music scenes of the early 1980s, rather than from more traditional art music circles. Decades later, in 2004, he dedicated his piano trio The Photography of Chance to the memory of John Peel, the legendary BBC presenter and advocate of new wave music.

Nyman’s sensitivity to popular music is evident in his recurring use of electric bass (in The Draughtsman's Contract and La Traversée de Paris) and amplification (his first three string quartets). He has collaborated with a wide range of pop musicians, from Damon Albarn to Alva Noto and Sting, as well as with traditional music artists from around the world. Romanian folk music — which he spent a year studying and collecting in 1965 — infuses several of his pieces, including his Quartets Nos. 1 and 3 (1990) and the soundtrack to Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1985). Traditional Indian music likewise inspired his Quartet No. 2 (1988) and Three Ways of Describing Rain (2003), written with singers Rajan and Sajan Mishra. In this synthesis of art, popular, and traditional idioms, Nyman may well be considered one of the pioneers of what is now called crossover.

Epilogue: The Musician as Filmmaker

An established film composer, Nyman has increasingly been influenced by the seventh art, so much so that in recent years he has become a filmmaker himself. Even in The Piano, he aimed to create an acoustic scenography, and since the 2010s he has fully embraced this perspective. In NYman with a Movie Camera (2002) — a remake of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent film Man with a Movie Camera — he demonstrated his talents as a filmmaker, photographer, archive image collector, and editor. Reflecting on his War Works: 8 Songs with Film, which combines archival images with his own images and music, Nyman remarked: “After I completed War Work I said, if I die, that’s how I want to be remembered. I feel I’ve written my greatest piece.”⁹

He adds: “Nothing I do as a composer is remotely as exciting to me as finding and capturing — and especially editing — my films. I find it is the most creative thing that I do.” While Nyman previously cited opera as his preferred genre, since the 2000s film has become his Gesamtkunstwerk. In the spring of 2020, had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, he would have been in Berlin to present his film work, including For John, Merce & Tacita From Michael, in which he films himself, the day after Merce Cunningham’s death, exploring a multi-screen installation by visual artist Tacita Dean that features Cunningham performing Cage’s 4’33’’.

What if, then, Nyman’s music were understood in cinematic terms, as an art of framing, drawing attention to fragments, details, and memories from the history of European music; as an art of movement; and, above all, as an art of montage?

<sup>1. On that topic, see “Y a-t-il un postmodernisme musical,” lecture by Karol Beffa — who categorizes Michael Nyman “as a postmodern composer” — at the Collège de France in 2016. https://books.openedition.org/cdf/4131?lang=fr>. Also see Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” in Current Musicology No. 66, New York, Columbia University, 1999. ↩
2. Intertextuality is at the heart of Welsh musicologist Pwyll ap Siôn’s book, the only monograph to date devoted to Nyman: The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, 2007. ↩
3. To use the title of Michael O’Shaughnessy’s “‘Romantic Minimalist’”: meaning and emotion in the film music of Michael Nyman,” The University of Western Australia, 2010, quoted in Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, Routledge, 2013, p. 192. ↩
4. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Cambridge University Press; 1999. ↩
5. Pwyll ap Siôn (ed.), Michael Nyman, Collected Writings, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. ↩
6. Cited by Pwyll ap Siôn, ibid. ↩
7. Jean-Pierre Dambricourt, 1998: “L’épuisement de la musique/La saturation des pseudo-universaux dans les œuvres de Michael Nyman,” in Costin Miereanu and Xavier Hascher (eds.), Les universaux en musique, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, 1998, pp. 307-321. ↩
8. Maarten Beirens, “The Identity of European Minimal Music,” doctoral dissertation, University of Louvain, Belgium, 2005, cited in Pwyll ap Siôn, The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts, op. cit., p. xvi. ↩
9. Michael Nyman, interview with Chris Meigh-Andrews, May 2017. https://www.meigh-andrews.com/writings/interviews/michael-nyman. ↩</sup>