Composer and pianist Michael Nyman earned recognition both for his modular compositions rooted in repetition and for first applying the phrase “minimal music,” an antecedent to minimalism itself, while contributing criticism during the 1960s. Although film scores brought him wider notice, a durable collaboration with director Peter Greenaway began in the late 1970s and encompassed arthouse titles such as the 1989 release The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and the 1991 film Prospero’s Books. Nevertheless, the BAFTA-nominated music for Jane Campion’s 1993 picture The Piano emerged as his most familiar achievement; its 1994 elaboration, The Piano Concerto, climbed into the upper reaches of the Billboard Traditional Classical Albums chart. Meanwhile he explored opera, ballet, and an assortment of chamber forms. Literary sources informed numerous pieces, from art songs drawing on Shakespeare and Rimbaud to 2007’s 8 Lust Songs, which set the erotic verse of Pietro Aretino. Throughout his catalog, Nyman’s hallmarks encompass propulsive repetition together with an idiosyncratic instrumental palette featuring thumping keyboards, “rude” bass clarinets and baritone saxophones, and octave doublings at extreme registers. In 2008 Queen Elizabeth II conferred upon him the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire). He continued to premiere new works and supply screen scores through the following decade, during which the long-running 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 under instructors that included Alan Bush and Geraint Jones. While pursuing three years of doctoral research at King’s College with musicologist Thurston Dart, whose specialty was the English Baroque, Nyman spent one year abroad examining Romanian folk traditions. Dart’s guidance also acquainted him with English rounds and canons from the 16th and 17th centuries, whose repetitive, contrapuntal textures later shaped his own writing; the same mentor prompted the Romanian journey. After completing his studies in 1967, Nyman felt estranged from both contemporary pop and the modernist school then 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 occasion on which he introduced the descriptor “minimal” to characterize musical practice.
Even while engaged in criticism, Nyman maintained performing activities, 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, tracing John Cage’s impact on a cohort of composers and performers. The book’s deepest effect, however, registered on Nyman himself, who located his personal direction through the process of writing it. In 1976 Harrison Birtwistle, then Director of Music at the National Theatre, invited him to arrange several 18th-century Venetian popular songs for a staging of Goldoni’s Il Campiello. Nyman scored the arrangements for medieval instruments—rebecs, sackbuts, shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and similar timbres—chosen to maximize volume and produce a singular instrumental hue. Once the production concluded, he began creating original music simply to retain the same ensemble; although initially acoustic, the group, rechristened the Michael Nyman Band in the early 1980s, adopted amplification as a defining element of its sound.
Having already worked with the director on several short films and on the 1980 feature The Falls, Nyman achieved his first substantial success with the score for Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract. Subsequent partnerships on projects such as the 1988 picture Drowning by Numbers, the 1989 release The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and the 1991 film Prospero’s Books ranked among his most visible accomplishments, though their prominence threatened to eclipse his contributions to opera, chamber music, vocal repertoire, and dance. Mozart exerted a central influence on many scores, among them 1976’s In Re Don Giovanni and 1983’s I’ll Stake My Cremona to a Jew’s Trump, yet Schumann provided the principal impetus for the 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Later, the 1988 String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, drew shading from Bartók. In 1990 Nyman wrote Six Celan Songs, settings of Paul Celan’s poetry for German cabaret singer Ute Lemper, with whom he had previously collaborated on the Prospero’s Books soundtrack. These emotionally charged pieces directly prompted the music for Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano. As with numerous other compositions, he repeatedly reworked the material, recasting its haunting melodies as a standard piano concerto (The Piano Concerto), for two pianos, for chamber ensemble, for soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found), and for soprano and string quartet (The Piano Sings). While 1992’s The Upside-Down Violin attested to his ongoing interest in regional folk traditions, 1993’s MGV, or Musique à Grande Vitesse, reaffirmed the energetic sonorities of the Michael Nyman Band. Additional major works from 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, derived from Yamamoto Perpetuo. He also continued scoring films, supplying music for the 1995 release Carrington, the 1997 picture Gattaca, and Michael Winterbottom’s 1999 film 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 from 1987. Nyman subsequently 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. His 2009 opera Sparkie: Cage and Beyond was realized in collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, and the 2011 opera Prologue to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell featured librettist Vera Pavlova. Throughout the decade he scored assorted films, including several documentaries, while also completing a song cycle, a piano quintet, and Trumpet & String Quartet (2013), among other 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 venture than many of his recent projects, the 2020 film Maigret et la Jeune Morte paired Nyman’s score with Gérard Depardieu’s portrayal of the celebrated French detective.
