Biography
Composer and pianist Michael Nyman earned acclaim for modular compositions built on repetition, yet it was his activity as a critic during the 1960s that led him to coin the phrase "minimal music," an expression that anticipated the later term minimalism. Although film scores brought him wider notice, a durable collaboration with director Peter Greenaway began in the late 1970s and encompassed such arthouse titles as 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and 1991's Prospero's Books. The score he supplied for Jane Campion's 1993 feature The Piano, which received a BAFTA nomination, nevertheless emerged as his most familiar achievement; the 1994 expansion titled The Piano Concerto subsequently climbed into the Top Ten of the Billboard Traditional Classical Albums chart. Meanwhile he explored opera, ballet, and an assortment of chamber works. Literary sources informed many pieces, from art songs drawing on Shakespeare and Rimbaud to 2007's 8 Lust Songs, which incorporated the erotic poetry of Pietro Aretino. Throughout his catalog, propulsive repetition remains a hallmark alongside distinctive instrumental choices such as thumping keyboards, "rude" bass clarinets and baritone saxophones, and extreme high-low octave doublings. Queen Elizabeth II conferred the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) upon him in 2008. He continued to premiere new compositions and write for the screen across the following decade, during which his long-running ensemble the Michael Nyman Band embarked on a 40th-anniversary tour in 2018.
Born Michael Laurence Nyman in Stratford, East London, on March 23, 1944, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music between 1961 and 1964 with instructors that included Alan Bush and Geraint Jones. While pursuing three years of Ph.D. work at King's College under musicologist Thurston Dart, whose specialty was the English Baroque, he spent one year abroad as an exchange student examining Romanian folk music. Dart's guidance exposed Nyman to 16th- and 17th-century English rounds and canons whose repetitive, contrapuntal lines left a lasting mark on his subsequent output; Dart likewise supported the Romanian journey. After completing his studies in 1967, Nyman felt estranged from both the prevailing pop music and the modernist compositional school associated with Stockhausen. Consequently he served as a music critic from 1964 to 1976, contributing to outlets such as The Listener, New Statesman, and The Spectator. A 1968 review of British composer Cornelius Cardew marked the first occasion he employed the descriptor "minimal" in a musical context.
Throughout those years he also performed, appearing alongside the Scratch Orchestra, Portsmouth Sinfonia, Steve Reich, and the Flying Lizards. In 1974 he authored the influential volume Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, which traced John Cage's impact on a cohort of composers and performers. The project exerted perhaps its deepest effect on Nyman himself, who, through the act of writing, appeared to locate his personal creative direction. An invitation from Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, led him in 1976 to arrange several 18th-century Venetian popular songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. The arrangements employed medieval instruments—rebecs, sackbuts, shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and similar timbres—chosen for their capacity to generate maximum volume and a singular instrumental hue. Once the production concluded, he began writing original music simply to retain the same ensemble. Initially an acoustic group, the ensemble acquired amplification as a core aesthetic element after it was renamed the Michael Nyman Band in the early 1980s.
Having already worked with the director on multiple short films and 1980's The Falls, Nyman achieved his first major success with the 1982 score for Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. Subsequent Greenaway collaborations, among them 1988's Drowning by Numbers, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and 1991's Prospero's Books, ranked among his highest-profile efforts, their visibility occasionally eclipsing his excursions into opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores.
While Mozart exerted a central influence on numerous works (1976's In Re Don Giovanni, 1983's I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump), Schumann provided the principal inspiration for the 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Later, 1988's String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, carried traces of Bartók. In 1990 Nyman created Six Celan Songs, drawn from the poetry of Paul Celan, for German cabaret singer Ute Lemper, with whom he had previously collaborated on the Prospero's Books score. These emotionally charged songs supplied the clearest impetus for the music he composed for Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano. As with many of his pieces, he repeatedly reworked the material; its haunting melodies resurfaced in arrangements for standard piano concerto (The Piano Concerto), two pianos, chamber ensemble, soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found), and soprano with string quartet (The Piano Sings). While 1992's The Upside-Down Violin attested to his ongoing interest in regional traditional music, 1993's MGV, or Musique a Grande Vitesse, returned to the amplified sonorities of the Michael Nyman Band. Other significant works of the period encompass 1993's Yamamoto Perpetuo, a composition for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu, 1994's solo harpsichord piece Tango for Tim, and 1995's String Quartet No. 4, itself derived from Yamamoto Perpetuo. He continued scoring films, supplying music for 1995's Carrington, 1997's Gattaca, and Michael Winterbottom's 1999 feature Wonderland.
The year 2000 brought the premiere of the opera Facing Goya, whose libretto by Victoria Hardie expanded their earlier one-act opera Vital Statistics. He next created two operas with playwright Michael Hastings: 2003's Man and Boy: Dada and 2005's Love Counts. Recorded soon after its premiere, the album 8 Lust Songs: I Sonetti Lussuriosi appeared on his own MN Records label in 2008, the same year he received the CBE for services to music.
Nyman's 2009 opera Sparkie: Cage and Beyond was realized in collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, and his 2011 opera Prologue to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell featured librettist Vera Pavlova. Across the decade he also scored assorted films, several of them documentaries, while composing a song cycle, a piano quintet, and Trumpet & String Quartet (2013), among additional projects. In 2015, during the Odessa International Film Festival, he supplied live accompaniment to the silent film Man with a Movie Camera on the Potemkin Stairs. The Michael Nyman Band marked its 40th anniversary with a tour in 2018. A more commercial film than his recent output, 2020's Maigret et la Jeune Morte, incorporated Nyman's music alongside Gérard Depardieu's portrayal of the celebrated French detective.
Born Michael Laurence Nyman in Stratford, East London, on March 23, 1944, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music between 1961 and 1964 with instructors that included Alan Bush and Geraint Jones. While pursuing three years of Ph.D. work at King's College under musicologist Thurston Dart, whose specialty was the English Baroque, he spent one year abroad as an exchange student examining Romanian folk music. Dart's guidance exposed Nyman to 16th- and 17th-century English rounds and canons whose repetitive, contrapuntal lines left a lasting mark on his subsequent output; Dart likewise supported the Romanian journey. After completing his studies in 1967, Nyman felt estranged from both the prevailing pop music and the modernist compositional school associated with Stockhausen. Consequently he served as a music critic from 1964 to 1976, contributing to outlets such as The Listener, New Statesman, and The Spectator. A 1968 review of British composer Cornelius Cardew marked the first occasion he employed the descriptor "minimal" in a musical context.
Throughout those years he also performed, appearing alongside the Scratch Orchestra, Portsmouth Sinfonia, Steve Reich, and the Flying Lizards. In 1974 he authored the influential volume Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, which traced John Cage's impact on a cohort of composers and performers. The project exerted perhaps its deepest effect on Nyman himself, who, through the act of writing, appeared to locate his personal creative direction. An invitation from Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, led him in 1976 to arrange several 18th-century Venetian popular songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. The arrangements employed medieval instruments—rebecs, sackbuts, shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and similar timbres—chosen for their capacity to generate maximum volume and a singular instrumental hue. Once the production concluded, he began writing original music simply to retain the same ensemble. Initially an acoustic group, the ensemble acquired amplification as a core aesthetic element after it was renamed the Michael Nyman Band in the early 1980s.
Having already worked with the director on multiple short films and 1980's The Falls, Nyman achieved his first major success with the 1982 score for Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. Subsequent Greenaway collaborations, among them 1988's Drowning by Numbers, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and 1991's Prospero's Books, ranked among his highest-profile efforts, their visibility occasionally eclipsing his excursions into opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores.
While Mozart exerted a central influence on numerous works (1976's In Re Don Giovanni, 1983's I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump), Schumann provided the principal inspiration for the 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Later, 1988's String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, carried traces of Bartók. In 1990 Nyman created Six Celan Songs, drawn from the poetry of Paul Celan, for German cabaret singer Ute Lemper, with whom he had previously collaborated on the Prospero's Books score. These emotionally charged songs supplied the clearest impetus for the music he composed for Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano. As with many of his pieces, he repeatedly reworked the material; its haunting melodies resurfaced in arrangements for standard piano concerto (The Piano Concerto), two pianos, chamber ensemble, soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found), and soprano with string quartet (The Piano Sings). While 1992's The Upside-Down Violin attested to his ongoing interest in regional traditional music, 1993's MGV, or Musique a Grande Vitesse, returned to the amplified sonorities of the Michael Nyman Band. Other significant works of the period encompass 1993's Yamamoto Perpetuo, a composition for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu, 1994's solo harpsichord piece Tango for Tim, and 1995's String Quartet No. 4, itself derived from Yamamoto Perpetuo. He continued scoring films, supplying music for 1995's Carrington, 1997's Gattaca, and Michael Winterbottom's 1999 feature Wonderland.
The year 2000 brought the premiere of the opera Facing Goya, whose libretto by Victoria Hardie expanded their earlier one-act opera Vital Statistics. He next created two operas with playwright Michael Hastings: 2003's Man and Boy: Dada and 2005's Love Counts. Recorded soon after its premiere, the album 8 Lust Songs: I Sonetti Lussuriosi appeared on his own MN Records label in 2008, the same year he received the CBE for services to music.
Nyman's 2009 opera Sparkie: Cage and Beyond was realized in collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, and his 2011 opera Prologue to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell featured librettist Vera Pavlova. Across the decade he also scored assorted films, several of them documentaries, while composing a song cycle, a piano quintet, and Trumpet & String Quartet (2013), among additional projects. In 2015, during the Odessa International Film Festival, he supplied live accompaniment to the silent film Man with a Movie Camera on the Potemkin Stairs. The Michael Nyman Band marked its 40th anniversary with a tour in 2018. A more commercial film than his recent output, 2020's Maigret et la Jeune Morte, incorporated Nyman's music alongside Gérard Depardieu's portrayal of the celebrated French detective.
Albums
