Biography of Michael Nyman

Biography of Michael Nyman

When Michael Nyman published his study Experimental Music: Cage and

Beyond (1974, reprinted 1999), he could hardly have foreseen his own

contribution to that 'beyond'. Disaffected with the then current

orthodoxies of international modernism, Nyman had abandoned

composition in 1964, preferring to work as a musicologist, editing

Purcell and Handel, and collecting folk music in Romania. Later he

wrote criticism for several journals, including The Spectator, where,

in a 1968 review of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Digest, he became the

first to apply the word 'minimalism' to music.

That same year, a BBC broadcast of Steve Reich's Come Out opened his

ears to further possibilities, and a route back to composition began

to emerge. In 1968 he wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's

'dramatic pastoral' Down by the Greenwood Side. Later, Birtwistle, by

now Musical Director of the National Theatre, London, commissioned him

to provide arrangements of 18th century Venetian songs for a 1976

production of Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello, for which Nyman assembled

what he would describe as 'the loudest unamplified street band' he

could imagine: rebecs, sackbuts, shawms alongside banjo, bass drum and

saxophone.

Nyman kept the Campiello Band together after the play's run had

finished, adding his own propulsive piano-playing to the mix. A band

needs repertoire, and Nyman set about providing it, beginning with In

Re Don Giovanni, a characteristic treatment of 16 bars of Mozart. The

Band's line-up mutated, amplification was added and the name changed

to the Michael Nyman Band. This is the laboratory in which Nyman has

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...erto for Gidon Kremer,

commissioned by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, to be premiered

at the Musikhalle, Hamburg on August 29th, 2003 under the baton of

Dennis Russell Davies and the Festival Orchestra.

Other recent successes have been the play Power by Nick Dear at the

National Theatre, London premiered on July 3rd for which Nyman wrote

the accompanying music and the BBC Concert Orchestra's programme of

selected Nyman film scores performed at the Royal Festival Hall, on

June 17th 2003.

At every turn Nyman has proved eminently practical. Not for him the

ivory tower anguish of a tormented composer grappling with abstract

systems. Rather he has consistently displayed an openness to

collaboration, a spry sense of humour, a literate imagination and an

instinctive ability to engage a highly diverse audience.