MICHAEL NYMAN DISCOGRAPHY RAR SERIES
His reputation was established through a series of highly successful scores for films directed by Peter Greenaway, including The Draughtsman's Contract, Prospero’s Books, A Zed and Two Naughts and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Nyman has also enjoyed a highly successful career as a film composer, a role in which, somewhat to his regret, he is best known to the general public. A subsequent commission from Birtwistle in 1976 to write music for Carlo Goldoni’s Il Campiello, the opening production at the National Theatre, led to the formation of the Campiello Band, (subsequently renamed the Michael Nyman Band) which for over four decades has been the laboratory for much of his inventive and experimental compositional work. In 1969 Nyman was commissioned to write the libretto for Sir Harrison Birtwistle's opera Down By The Greenwood Side. In 1974, as a development of his journalistic work, Nyman published the still-classic book on new music, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Studio Vista, London). Most of his important reviews, articles and interviews from The Spectator, New Statesman, The Listener and Studio International have since been published in Michael Nyman: Collected Writings, (Ashgate, 2013). In 1968, whilst working as music critic for The Spectator he coined the term ‘minimal music’ and in the following decade he both reflected and influenced a certain school of thought in contemporary music. He spent the academic year 1965/6 as a British Council exchange student collecting folk music in Romania. Between 1964-67 Nyman was a Ph.D student at King’s College, London under Thurston Dart, studying English baroque music and the principles of scholarly editing, producing the first modern edition of Purcell’s Catches (Stainer and Bell, 1967) and a new edition of Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op.6 (Eulenberg, 1973).
In addition to his prolific output as a composer, Nyman is also a conductor, pianist, writer, musicologist, photographer and film-maker- his restless creativity and multi-faceted career making him one of the most dynamic and influential figures in contemporary culture.īorn in Stratford, East London on 23 March 1944, he was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow and studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1961-64 with Dr Peter Fletcher, Alan Bush and Geraint Jones.
His reputation is built upon a substantial body of work written for a wide variety of ensembles, not only for his own band, but also for symphony orchestra, choir and string quartet. Michael Nyman is undoubtedly one of the UK’s most innovative and celebrated composers.
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