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Michael Nyman

 
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Michael Nyman

Biography

Michael Nyman ranks as one of the hardest working and most prolific composers of the 20th century. Early in his career, he was closely associated with director Peter Greenaway, for whom he composed several film scores, but in addition to movie work, Nyman's musical portfolio includes everything from string quartets to operas to avant-garde arrangements for his Michael Nyman Band. He is, by his own definition, a minimalist, and following the tradition begun by seminal American avant-garde composer John Cage, he draws freely from established works, taking small, often simple pieces of existing music (excerpted from sources ranging from Romanian folk songs to Mozart) and expanding upon them through repetition, layering, and changing enough elements to render them his own unique creations.

A native of London, Nyman studied under Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music. Between 1961 and 1965, he was mentored by famed Baroque scholar Thurston Dart at Kings College. Music was undergoing radical changes when Nyman graduated in the mid-'60s. This was a time when the Beatles and other musical innovators ruled the airwaves, and Nyman found himself rebelling against the more orthodox serialist view of classical music adopted by many modern composers. Rather than create music in such an atmosphere, Nyman chose to write about it. For the next decade, his alternately critical and scholarly articles appeared in such journals as The Spectator, The Listener, and The New Statesman. It was Nyman who coined the term "minimalism" to describe English composer Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning." In addition to writing about music, Nyman also performed with groups such as the Flying Lizards and the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

During this period, Nyman wrote what would become the definitive book on the musical implications and influence of John Cage and his work, Experimental Music -- Cage and Beyond (1974). Two years later, he accepted an invitation from Harrison Birtwistle (Director of Music at the National Theatre) to arrange an 18th century Venetian gondolier's songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. Using an eclectic blend of medieval and modern instruments, including a banjo and soprano sax, Nyman created a distinctive, colorful sound that would later become the trademark of the Michael Nyman Band in the early '80s.

Nyman had been scoring the work of filmmaker Peter Greenaway since 1976, but his music did not reach a wider audience until he scored Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). Nyman gleaned the basis of the soundtrack from pieces of obscure songs from England's greatest Baroque composer, Henry Purcell, and while the finished product bore little resemblance to its sources, it still paid them tribute. As is the case with his other musical scores, Nyman would return to this one several times, extracting bits from the first adaptation to transform them into new, innovative works.

In between Greenaway features, Nyman conceived, scored, and even appeared in a short film commemorating the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death, Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), directed by Jeremy Newson. Using Mozart's harmonies, Nyman utilized excerpts from the great composer's letters to his father, including his last note as song lyrics. The film starred German soprano Ute Lemper, for whom Nyman penned "Six Celan Songs." It was frequently paired with a similarly themed short by Greenaway, M is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991). Nyman would continue working for Greenaway through Prospero's Books (1991), when he objected to the filmmaker's decision to augment the film's haunting vocal score with wandering synthesizer music. Their subsequent lack of association was perhaps a good thing for Nyman, who felt that his high-profile collaboration with Greenaway was overshadowing his other works.

Although he would spend more time on his other projects, Nyman did not abandon film scoring entirely. It was, in fact, a movie score that brought Nyman international mainstream attention. For Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), Nyman utilized traditional Scottish songs and created an unusually lyrical and emotional blend of pop and classical that resulted in a hit soundtrack CD. There was a two-fold purpose in keeping the music relatively simple and very accessible. First, Nyman had to create music easy enough for actress Holly Hunter to play, and secondly, as her character was mute, the music had to convey the thoughts and emotions she could not verbalize. Again, the music proved to be highly successful, and Nyman subsequently developed it into several new works. He also continued to write scores for films ranging from Roger Spottiswood's biopic Mesmer (1994) to Andrew Niccol's futuristic epic Gattaca (1997) to Wonderland (1999), Michael Winterbottom's portrait of the shifting fortunes of a working-class London family. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
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Gale Musician Profiles:

Michael Nyman

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Film composer

As if describing his own musical career, composer Michael Nyman told Time magazine, "music is power, passion, pulse, pain." Indeed, he has reached the "power" of commercial success. He has exemplified the "passion" of composition—and has reacted passionately to the lack of respect he has sometimes received from British critics and contemporary composers. His long list of compositions has proved the nonstop "pulse" of his creative output. And despite his accomplishments, Nyman has discussed how the music community once defined him as a film composer and the "pains" he went through to break out of that confinement to gain recognition as a multitalented, crossover composer.

Nyman’s interest in music began in childhood. At the age of eight, his talent earned the attention of his instructor, Leslie J. Winters, at the Chase Lane School in Northeast London. "I couldn’t sing or play, but he saw some quality in me no one had noticed before," Nyman told Timothy White in Billboard. "It’s one of the mysteries of my life."

Nyman went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music and at King’s College in London. His mentors in school included English harpsichordist Thurston Dart and the composer Alan Bush. Nyman’s instructors purported the idea that serial music—music founded on a set of tones displaying a particular pattern and disregarding traditional tonality—was the only music worth writing. Nyman attempted to write serial pieces, but he eventually gave up composing in 1964. Instead, he went to work as a music writer and critic for the Listener, New Statesman, and Spectator.

From Critic to Composer
In 1968 Nyman introduced the term "minimalism" to musical parlance in a review of English composer Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning. Nyman published a book on minimalism in 1974 titled Experimental MusicCage and Beyond. In his book, Nyman explained how the work of English experimentalists like John Cage and John White ventured into new areas of composing. He wrote that these composers gave permission to use a single phrase from a classical piece of the past as a resource for an entire composition. In fact, Nyman would later use this same technique in some of his own musical compositions.

Two years after Nyman’s book was released, Henry Birtwistle, the director of music at the National Theatre in England, asked Nyman to arrange the music for a production of II Campiello by Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni. Nyman formed a band for the stage production

which featured a combination of period instruments, including rebecs and sackbuts, as well as other instruments, like the banjo and saxophone. During his participation in IICampiello, Nyman composed some incidental music that effectively revived his composition career. He continued working with the band he’d formed, later known as the Michael Nyman Band, and found his own minimalist style in his composition of In Re Don Giovanni.

Nyman began his long collaborative relationship with filmmaker Peter Greenaway in the mid-1970s, writing the musical scores for Greenaway’s sequence of British Film Institute shorts. The two released the first of their 18 short and feature films, One to One-Hundred, in 1976. Unlike most film composers, Nyman wrote the music for Greenaway’s films in long, continuous streams before the film began shooting. Once Greenaway finished filming, he would trim the music to fit the visual images, making Nyman’s music an integral part of the production.

A Decade of New Beginnings
In 1977 Nyman released two of his works on the Obscure Records British music collection. Bell Set No. 1 and One to One-Hundred filled an entire side of Obscure 6: Decay Music. His music achieved international notoriety with the soundtrack for the Greenaway film The Draughtsman’s Contract in 1982. Nyman and Greenaway continued their collaborative relationship throughout the 1980s, scoring films like A Zed and Two Noughts, Drowning by Numbers, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

During the mid-1980s, Nyman wrote his first string quartet, String Quartet No. 1, for the Arditti Quartet. The foundation for this piece came from Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2. He followed with String Quartet No. 2and String Quartet No. 3 in 1988 and 1990, respectively.

Another first in Nyman’s career came in 1986 when he released his own opera, titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He based the story on a book by American neurologist Oliver Sacks about a music professor, Dr. P, who suffers from visual agnosia (the inability to recognize what he sees). Dr. P depended on certain songs to guide him through his disorder—eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs. "When I performed that piece for the first time in October 1986," Nyman told Billboard, "I came off stage shaking with emotion. My attitude when writing it was very cool, analytical, yet I somehow injected the material with great empathy."

Commercial Success and Critical Remarks
Nyman ended his long partnership with Peter Greenaway after the release of the film Prospero’s Books, based on William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Nyman used three singers from different genres—rock, opera, and cabaret—in the work. Prospero’s Books was the first musical collaboration between Nyman and German cabaret singer Ute Lemper. It was the last of his pairings with Greenaway, however, because of changes and additions Greenaway made to Nyman’s original score.

In 1991 Nyman produced a flood of new compositions. In a single year, he signed a new record deal, with Argo/Decca/London; wrote Songbook, which included the "Six Celan Songs" that he wrote for Ute Lemper and with whom he performed them all over the world; and wrote six song-texts called Letters, Riddles and Writs, a music-theater piece for the BBC’s "Not Mozart" series. The music for "Not Mozart" actually consists of reworkings from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and portions of his string quartets. The words came from letters written by Mozart and his father to each other. Nyman explained in the Independent why he feels such a connection to Mozart, a connection critics had not detected: "Did Mozart write for love? No. He wrote for money. And he had a father who was more of a PR agent than I’ve ever had: a man who walked around with his son’s manuscripts in his back pocket ready to show off to any likely patron. No one held that against Mozart as they would against me."

Despite his break with Greenaway, Nyman continued to write for film. In 1992 he wrote the score for the French film The Hairdresser’s Husband, directed by Pierre Leconte. The film score that gained Nyman international commercial success, however, was The Piano, released in 1993. The Piano soundtrack reached gold record status in the U.S. and sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide.

Nyman celebrated his 50th birthday in 1994 with five orchestral commissions; two LPs, The Piano Concerto and MGV and Breaking the Rules; and the Michael Nyman Band’s North American debut tour. The following year, he released the score for the dance opera The Princess of Milan by Karine Saporta. Like Prospero’s Books, the story line is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In early 1995, Nyman was working on a possible U.S. commission for his cherished operatic version of Tristam Shandy, which he describes as the ultimate "stackable" opera.

Despite his warm manner with close friends, reported ABC Radio 24 Hours, Nyman can seem aloof and confesses to a certain shyness. "Work is a great avoidance mechanism," he explained, "it allows me to distance myself from humans." Nyman’s long and prolific musical career has brought him prosperity. He lives in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the French Pyrenees with his wife, Aet, and composes in a converted barn. He also maintains a four-story Victorian home in London with a studio on the top floor. "I don’t write music to grab a large audience, though I’m pleased that I do," Nyman told Time. "But success doesn’t exactly help you confront that terrible blank page. When I sit down to write a piece of music, it’s still the same old Michael Nyman, excited and terrified at the same time."

Selected discography
One to One-Hundred, Argo, 1976.
Obscure 6: Decay Music (compilation), Obscure, 1977.
The Draughtsman’s Contract, Argo, 1982.
String Quartet No. 1, Argo, 1985.
A Zed and Two Noughts, Virgin, 1985.
And They Do, That’s Entertainment, 1986.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, CBS, 1986.
Zoo Caprices, That’s Entertainment, 1986.
Drowning by Numbers, Virgin, 1987.
String Quartet No. 2, Argo, 1988.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Virgin, 1989.
Out of the Ruins, Silva Screen, 1989.
String Quartet No. 3, Argo, 1990.
Prospero’s Books, Decca/London, 1991.
Flugel and Piano: For Flugelhorn & Piano, Virgin, 1991.
String Quartets 1–3, Argo, 1991.
The Convertibility of Lute Strings for Harpsichord, Argo, 1992.
For John Cage: For Brass Ensemble, Argo, 1992.
Time Will Pronounce, Argo, 1992.
The Essential Michael Nyman Band, Argo, 1992.
(With Ute Lemper) Songbook, Argo, 1992.
The Piano, Virgin, 1993.
The Piano Concerto and MGV ("Musique a Grande Vitesse"), Argo, 1994.
Breaking the Rules, Virgin, 1994.
The Princess of Milan, Argo, 1995.

Sources
Books
Mertens, Wim, American Minimal Music, Alexander Broude, Inc., 1983.
Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Schirmer Books, 1974.

Periodicals
ABC Radio 24 Hours, June 1993.
BBC Music Magazine, April 1993.
Billboard, October 23, 1993; September 10, 1994; October 1, 1994.
Classic CD, March 1992.
Gramophone, August 1991; July 1993.
Guardian, October 5, 1993; November 12, 1993.
Independent, November 8, 1991; December 1, 1993.
Keyboard, October 1993.
Music & Musicians, September 1969; October 1971; January 1977.
Musical Events, December 1969.
Musical Times, December 1973.
New Republic, July 27, 1992.
New York Times, May 5, 1991; March 15, 1992.
Observer Life, February 20, 1994.
Opera, July 1980; January 1987; June 1987; August 1987; October 1987; March 1990; September 1992.
Pulse!, May 1993.
Q Magazine, September 1993.
Sunday Times (London), January 9, 1994.
Sunday Times Magazine (London), October 31, 1993.
Time, November 14, 1994.
Wire, July 1993.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from Virgin Records and Argo Records press materials, 1995.
  • Genres: Soundtrack

Biography

Celebrated for his modular, repetitive style, minimalist composer Michael Nyman was among experimental music's most high-profile proponents, best known in connection with his film scores for director Peter Greenaway. Born in London on March 23, 1944, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London, under communist composer Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, a musicologist specializing in the English Baroque. Under Dart's tutelage, Nyman was introduced to 16th- and 17th-century English rounds and canons, their repetitive, contrapuntal lines highly influencing his own later work; Dart also encouraged him to travel to Romania in the interest of seeking out the country's native folk music traditions. Upon graduating during the mid-'60s, Nyman found himself disconnected from both the pop music of the times and the school of modern composition heralded by Stockhausen; as a result, from 1964 to 1976, he worked not as a composer but as a music critic, writing for publications including The Listener, New Statesman, and The Spectator. In a review of British composer Cornelius Cardew, he first introduced the word "minimalism" as a means of musical description.

During this same period, Nyman did continue performing, appearing with artists ranging from the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia to Steve Reich and the Flying Lizards. In 1974, he wrote the influential book Experimental Music -- Cage and Beyond, an exploration of the influence of John Cage on a generation of composers and performers. Perhaps its most profound impact was on Nyman himself, who through writing the book seemed to discover his own muse; in 1976 he accepted an invitation from Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, to arrange a number of 18th-century Venetian popular songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. Nyman's arrangements consisted of medieval instruments -- rebecs, sackbuts and shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and the like -- designed for maximum loudness to produce a distinctive instrumental color; when the production ended, he began composing original music merely to keep the same group of musicians together. Originally an acoustic unit, when rechristened the Michael Nyman Band in the early '80s, amplification became essential to their aesthetic.

Nyman's first major success came in 1982 with the score to the Greenaway film The Draughtsman's Contract; his subsequent collaborations with Greenaway on pictures including 1988's Drowning By Numbers, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and 1991's Prospero's Books remain among his most high-profile works, their notoriety coming at the risk of overshadowing his forays into opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores. The signatures of Nyman's work include not only his use of propulsive repetition, but also a palette of idiosyncratic instrumental touches -- thumping keyboards, "rude" bass clarinets, and baritone saxophones, and extreme high and low octave doublings. Mozart was a central influence in much of his work, including 1976's In Re Don Giovanni and 1983's I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump; Schumann, meanwhile, was the major inspiration behind the acclaimed 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, while Bartok shades 1988's String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for the Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh.

In 1990, Nyman composed Six Celan Songs, a work based on the poems of Paul Celan, for the German cabaret singer Ute Lemper, with whom he first worked on the score for Prospero's Books. His most emotional compositions to date, they served as the clear impetus for his score to Jane Campion's 1992 film The Piano, easily Nyman's best-known work; like so many of his compositions, he obsessively reworked the music to The Piano time and time again, the haunting melodies reappearing arranged for standard 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 reflected Nyman's continuing fascination with traditional ethnic musics, 1993's MGV, or Musique a Grande Vitesse, returned to the propulsive sounds of the Michael Nyman Band. Other major works include 1992's Time Will Pronounce, 1993's Yamamoto Perpetuo (a composition for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu), 1994's solo harpsichord work Tango for Tim, and 1995's String Quartet No. 4. Among Nyman's film scores: 1995's Carrington and 1997's Gattaca. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Michael Nyman

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Nyman in 2010

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born in Stratford, London, 23 March 1944) is a British composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film 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, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, Love Counts, and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, 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 stated that he prefers to write opera rather than other sorts of music.[1]

Contents

Biography

Nyman was born in Stratford, London. He was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow. He studied at King's College, London under Alan Bush.,[2] and was accepted at the Royal Academy of Music 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 of 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 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]

Nyman at the 2009 Venice Film Festival

He has scored numerous films, the majority of them European art films, including several of those directed by Peter Greenaway. His few forays into Hollywood 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. Nyman's popularity increased after he wrote the score to Jane Campion's award-winning 1993 film The Piano. The album became a classical music best-seller. He was nominated for both a British Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

Among Nyman's other 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. In 2000, 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.

He has also composed the music for the children's television series Titch which is based on the books written and illustrated by Pat Hutchins.

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 line-up 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 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 Water on the Martin Lewis-produced 20 Classic Rock Classics album on which the Sinfonia gave their unique interpretations of the pop and rock repertoire of the 1950s–1970s. Nyman created a similar group called Foster's Social Orchestra, which specialised in the work of Stephen Foster. One of their pieces appeared in the film Ravenous and an additional work, 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 (1980) appears on their album Fourth Wall as "Hands 2 Take."

On 7 July 2007 Nyman performed at Live Earth in Japan. On 2008 Nyman realised, in collaboration with the cultural association Volumina, Sublime, an artist's book that unified his music with his passion for photography.

In a collaboration with friends Max Pugh and Marc Silver, Nyman is now beginning to exhibit his films and photography. Nyman’s video works are filmed with a hand-held camera, often before and after concerts and as part of his international travels, featuring everyday moments. Some works are left relatively unedited whilst others undergo split screens and visual repetition.[original research?] Soundtracks to some of the video works use location sounds, whilst others recycle existing scores from his archive or a combination of both.

In October 2009, Nyman released The Glare, a collaborative collection of songs with David McAlmont, which cast his work in a new light. The album – recorded with the Michael Nyman Band – finds McAlmont putting lyrics based on contemporary news stories to 11 pieces of Nyman music drawn from different phases of his career.

"David did the research and chose most of the musical pieces," Nyman explains. "I suggested a few pieces,too but I really didn't do very much, although I think it's a true collaboration. You can identify who was responsible for what, but both aspects create a perfect synergy in which neither element can exist without the other."[cite this quote]

Although the album was recorded in just two days, there was a huge amount of preparation and rewriting before they entered the studio. "They're third generation songs and when you listen to them, you ask 'Is it Nyman?' 'Is it soul?' 'Is it rock'n'roll?' It's all and none of them," the composer says. "I think we've created a new musical language. I'm no good at writing pop cliché – when I try, it invariably comes out sounding quite different."[cite this quote]

The project has a long gestation for the pair first met in 2004 at a exhibition opening and talked about working together. Nothing came of it for almost five years until they got together again via Facebook, met up for lunch – and the idea for The Glare was born.

"I was surprised and delighted by what we've came up with," Nyman says. "So much so, that when I now play these pieces solo, it sounds like something's missing and the music needs David's voice and approach. That's a remarkable thing, because I've been playing these pieces for years. Of all the many collaborations I've been involved in, none has ever given me more pleasure and I'm desperate to take it on the road and play these."[cite this quote]

Personal life

He was 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.

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.[6]

Nyman was awarded an honorary doctorate (DLitt) from The University of Warwick on 30 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.[7]

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 Tree (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)

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

Nyman's music re-used

  • Nyman's "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" (from The Piano) is the music on which Italian rock noir band Belladonna's song "Let There Be Light" is based. Released in December 2010, the track features Michael Nyman himself on piano.[8]
  • 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.
  • 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 one-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 had refused to release the song initially; he later authorised its use.
  • 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".
  • Nyman's piece "Car Crash" from A Zed & Two Noughts was used for once on the final episode of a Greek series called 'To Kafe Tis Xaras'

Recordings

References

  1. ^ Michael Nyman talks to John Leeman about his opera Man and Boy: Dada
  2. ^ Michael Nyman Biography - ARTISTdirect Music
  3. ^ Siôn, 18
  4. ^ Pwyll ap Siôn The Music of Michael Nyman. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. p. 83
  5. ^ Andrew Ford. "Jerry Lee Lewis Plays Mozart." Composer to Composer London: Quartet Books, 1993. pp 192–195, p 194
  6. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 58729. p. 8. 14 June 2008.
  7. ^ Honorary Degrees for Sir Antony Sher, Michael Nyman and Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys
  8. ^ Michael Nyman - Press Coverage

External links

Listening


 
 
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