Michael Nyman - Strategies of the Sublime

Michael Nyman is one of the greatest living composers, as well as one of the undisputed masters of minimalism, the musical movement of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Wim Mertens. He is responsible for some of the most memorable film scores of the twentieth century, from The Draughtsman's Contract and Prospero's Books by Peter Greenaway, to Jane Campion's The Piano, to Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland. Today, the English musician performs concerts all over the world, while dozens of directors chase after him to get him to compose their film scores. Sounds that arise "from a very personal musical anguish", and manage to combine folk, electronics, sacred and classical music, into a thrilling sonic blend, because music - he explains - "is power, passion, instinct, pain".

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and King's College London, after a spell spent studying Romanian folk music, Nyman abandoned composition for several years to establish himself as a music critic (in 1968, he was the first to apply the term "minimalism" to music), occasionally writing music for theatre and a few short films.

In 1974 he published the essay "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" and, a couple of years later, his Decay Music revisited the "slow-motion" lesson of Steve Reich and the ambient approach of Brian Eno, charting new harmonic trajectories.

In 1976, on the occasion of a production of Carlo Goldoni's "Il Campiello", the founding nucleus of what would become the Michael Nyman Band was born: a small orchestra, now amplified, for which the musician would conceive the bulk of his own music.

In 1981, the lengthy "M-Work" continued his comic reworking of minimalism, amid self-aware jokes, counterpoints, choruses and crescendos. But it was above all thanks to his partnership with English director Peter Greenaway that Nyman established himself among the pantheon of neoclassical composers. A collaboration that proved to be a winner right from the start. "Greenaway," the English composer recalls, "would ask me for a musical accompaniment to a five-minute sequence and I would write it, but he never told me what he wanted. Ours was, in a sense, a partnership of equals. A director thinks he's also directing the composer, and that doesn't work too well... With Peter Greenaway I never had to beg for a bit of creative freedom, because that's a perfectly normal thing with him. Today I realise I had the great privilege of working with a director who simply let me sit down at the piano and compose the music I wanted to accompany his images."

The first memorable work by the Greenaway-Nyman duo is the score for The Draughtsman's Contract, an admirable fusion of classicism and modernity, suffused with an arcane, magical quality. "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds" is the best-known piece from the score, which was soon followed by further successful collaborations: the stunning Prospero's Books, the complex Drowning By Numbers, a series of variations on Mozart's sinfonia concertante for an ensemble of twenty instruments, and the vibrant melodies of A Zed & Two Noughts and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

Music that is airy, at times baroque, built on sweeping string progressions, the insistent repetition of simple phrases, and ancient melodies reminiscent of an eighteenth-century adagio. But above all, visionary music, capable of stirring the same emotions as the frames it was written for, without ever being dependent on them: "I've never consciously composed visual music," he explains. "No frame from any film has ever made me think: 'I must express this image with this particular music...'. My work often inspires deep, unconscious, dreamlike images. If different images become attached to my music, I think that's all fine. It's a different matter to think that only the film's scenes can be linked to it. Music draws its strength and soul from our memory and our consciousness. Many of my compositions are, in fact, tied to Greenaway's films, while in my mind they are connected to sensations and emotions I experienced before I even composed those notes."

One day, however, something broke between the English director and his trusted composer: "We had a fierce argument and from that day on we never spoke again," Nyman has recounted. "Personally, I'm convinced that a great deal of the success of his films was down to my scores. From 1991 until 16 July 1998 I never spoke a word to him again. Last summer, though, I went to Amsterdam to see the staging of his opera 'Rosa'. I went to see him in his dressing room, I hugged him and said: 'It's good to see you again...'. He was very surprised to see me, because he would never have imagined I'd come to find him. Now that we've broken the ice, it's possible our collaboration might take flight once more." For now, we'll have to make do with the anthology that bears their name: Nyman/Greenaway Soundtracks, recently reissued in a new "revisited" version (2005). An excellent collection of his film successes is The Very Best of Michael Nyman (2001), which gathers the best of his output between 1980 and 2001.

Another significant milestone in the British maestro's career is The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1987), for septet, which updates the great British tradition of chamber opera, straddling romantic minimalism and musical theatre song.

And Carrington's score is further proof of his refined elegance.

But the work that brought Nyman to the attention of a wider audience is the soundtrack to The Piano (1993) by Australian director Jane Campion (almost two million copies sold). The main theme is a piano sonata dominated by a poignant melancholy and by that transcendent quality that can also be felt in the film itself. Nyman's music, in fact, is also apocalyptic music, deeply pervaded by a sense of death: "I consider the Requiem Mass to be the supreme expression of music from past centuries in relation to death. Its ritual nature served to exalt the sacred and spiritual dimension. For a composer, writing a requiem was an extremely complex undertaking. In my music, on the other hand, the religious aspect is absent, because I don't have the formal habit of ritualizing the content of my compositions about death through religion. From an artistic point of view, my relationship with death came about in a completely accidental way. In Greenaway's films, reflection on death is always very present, and so I had to confront it almost by chance. The death of some of my friends then showed me how necessary a musical response to these tragic moments was for me. I still remember the most painful encounter with death I have ever had, namely the news of what happened at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels to Juventus fans in 1985. The death of those 40 people deeply disturbed me, and always will" (an episode that inspired the composition "Memorial").

In more recent years, after brilliantly scoring the futuristic settings of Gattaca (1997), Nyman began a collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom, composing the soundtracks for the films Wonderland (1999) and The Claim (2000). "Wonderland", which lends a marked lyricism to the film's scenes of modern everyday life, is an extraordinary concept album: the same theme recurs in a series of variations, and each track bears the name of a character from the film, yet with an internal coherence that is nonetheless exquisitely musical. It is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the composer's output, and the piano pieces lose nothing by comparison with those of The Piano.

2005 saw the birth of the musician's own label, Mn Records. Inaugurating the new project is The Piano Sings, a collection of pieces drawn from various soundtracks and reinterpreted according to their original idea, performed solely on piano. New versions of The Draughtsman's Contract and The Piano followed. Nyman's music, in short, is in constant evolution, thriving on its relationship with its audience, and refuses to be consigned in definitive form to the original soundtracks for which it was composed.

In 2009 came the unexpected collaboration with singer David McAlmont.

In The Glare (2009), Nyman's harmonic constructions are perfect for David's lyrics: they recount life with the same intensity as a love song; financial crises, reality shows, prostitution, loneliness and suicide are described with sincerity and empathy. "Take The Money And Run" and "City Of Turin" are two sonic tours de force for McAlmont's voice: the sax quartets and the orchestral and rhythmic variations are hardly the easiest backdrop for a singer, but the result is thrilling. Nyman reworks many of his best-known themes to clothe McAlmont's lyrics, and reinterprets Mozart on the vigorous "In Rai Don Giovanni" (whose lyrics are a fierce piece of irony aimed at Berlusconi). The ballads are more straightforward and effortless, with the voice stretching out in full force, but beyond the simplest blend of voice and orchestration, there are tracks of real compositional sophistication. "In Laos", the most pop of the tracks, tugs at the heartstrings of memory (the Korgis?), while "Secrets, Accusations And Charges" is one of the most romantic performances of the year.

Little sound films, charming operettas: that's what the twelve episodes of The Glare amount to. Nyman's cinematic music absorbs new influences without losing its power on "A Great Day In Kathmandu", and underscores with great intensity the story of an assisted suicide on "Friendly Fire", a track whose power and poetry belong more to the world of images, with voice and orchestra whispering and quivering with all the delicacy of a flickering flame.

Critics have always linked his music to that of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the two American pioneers of minimalism; but he partly denies it: "I don't think there's such a strong connection. My music springs from knowledge of their sound, but then takes other paths. A composer has to build on what already exists — Bach listened to Vivaldi, Vivaldi listened to Corelli, and so on back to Monteverdi. There is, however, a shared language and attitude."

Now, while the most celebrated directors vie for his services, the composer tours the world with his Michael Nyman Band. With one dream in mind: "I would like the whole world to feel inspired and helped by my compositions, for people in clubs as well as academics to listen to my work and draw some personal benefit from it. Maybe it will never happen, because I'll keep writing mainly for myself anyway."

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