Minimalist to the Max

By Michael Walsh

The man who wrote last year's most memorable and original movie score -- for Jane Campion's The Piano -- was not even nominated for an Academy Award. That says a lot about the Oscars, but it also says something about Michael Nyman, a composer who has never quite received his due. Whether writing for films or turning out concertos, string quartets, ballets and chamber operas, the English critic turned composer is a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic who yearns for wider acceptance. "I've had to contend with a certain amount of envy and puffy-nosed disapproval," he says. "I can do a concert at Festival Hall in London and get a standing ovation, which doesn't happen much in new music. And there will always be a few sour-faced critics who sit around puzzled and angered and mystified."

That is all changing. The swift success of both Campion's protofeminist film and Nyman's lush, haunting score (more than 1.5 million CDs sold to date) has meant far fewer puffy noses and sour faces. Previously, Nyman was best known for the music he wrote for the idiosyncratic director Peter Greenaway (The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover) and for his own superb 1987 opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, based on Oliver Sacks' best-selling book about neurological disorders. On a recent tour of North America with his 10- piece chamber orchestra, the Michael Nyman Band, the 50-year-old composer drew hip audiences and packed houses for programs of his recent works, highlighted by The Piano Concerto, a concert version of the film score.

All this is something of a triumph for someone who, just two decades ago, viewed composition from the other side of the musical fence. As a critic for the New Statesman and the Spectator, Nyman was a trenchant observer of the avant-garde (in 1968 he coined the term minimal music to describe the emerging Minimalist movement) and in 1974 brilliantly surveyed the field in his book

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. But then Nyman -- who studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at King's College, London, with the early-music specialist and harpsichordist Thurston Dart -- concluded that an even better way to affect the fortunes of contemporary music was to write it himself. In 1976 he composed incidental music for a play by Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni at Britain's National Theatre. He quickly found his own Minimalist style in In Re Don Giovanni (1976), and when Greenaway came calling for the first of their 10 films together, One to One Hundred, Nyman found his true pitch.

In one sense, he has never left criticism behind. His scores are replete with references to other music, and he uses the source material as the launching point for his own rhythmically relentless, acerbically orchestrated commentaries. "Music," he says, "is power, passion, pulse, pain." In the psychologically astute The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, for example, Nyman used a Schumann song, Ich grolle nicht, as the musical foundation of the opera to illustrate the eponymous victim's visual agnosia: unable to synthesize visual images, the man relied on Schumann's music to help him apprehend the world. In The Piano, Scottish folk tunes suffused the keyboard reveries that gave the mute heroine Ada her soaringly distinctive if wildly anachronistic voice: the result was a blend of rigorous Minimalism, frank Romanticism and the listener-friendly ecstasies of New Age music.

"I don't think my music relates to Philip Glass and Steve Reich at all," says Nyman, referring to the two American pioneers of Minimalism, "but it originated from knowing their music. A composer builds on the tradition that's already established. Bach listened to Vivaldi, Vivaldi listened to Corelli, and the roots go back to Monteverdi. There's a common language or attitude."

Nyman spends half the year developing his attitude in the solitude of an 18th century farmhouse in the French Pyrenees, where he lives with his Estonian wife Aet. A couple of months a year at his other home in north London enables him to indulge his passion for the Queen's Park Rangers soccer team; the rest of the time he's on the road with the band.

For all his growing popularity, Nyman yearns for greater respectability in his homeland, where his film-music origins are still dismissed by practitioners of an academic avant-garde who are even more provincial, unlistenable and irrelevant than their counterparts in the U.S. "England has always been far less culturally democratic than America, and I was looked down on," he observes with some asperity. "They didn't listen to whether what I was producing was conventional pap or contemporary music in its own right -- which I think it was."

Not that it matters too much, since new commissions are flooding in. "I don't write music to grab a large audience, though I'm pleased that I do," the composer says. "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." His listeners are happy to go along for the ride.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York