Michael Nyman: Composer in Progress; Michael Nyman: In Concert (review)

In 1993, Michael Nyman was blindsided by the overwhelming success of his film score for Jane Campion’s The Piano. In crafting the voice for Holly Hunter’s mute character, Ada, Nyman believed he was writing for a film with the reach of his collaborations with Peter Greenaway—art house fare little seen by mainstream audiences. However, The Piano exploded into the cultural consciousness, and Nyman’s score, drenched with Scottish melodies subjected to his trademark style of motoric repetition and layering, went on to sell over three million copies. Nyman became an overnight success twenty years in the making.

Even with the name recognition that came from The Piano, Nyman did not receive the imprimatur of the British musical establishment until sixteen years later when he was invited to perform at the 2009 BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall. Silvia Beck’s portrait of Nyman, fittingly called Composer in Progress, takes these two moments when Nyman bathed in the popular limelight as touchstones from which to explore the composer’s diverse interests and activities. With seemingly full access both to Nyman and his core musicians, Beck has created a frustratingly fascinating film that provides tantalizing glimpses of the composer, but not a full portrait.

Instead of a straight-forward chronological approach, Beck has opted to engage Nyman episodically. Where many filmmakers would seek entry into a composer’s aesthetic by beginning at the beginning with childhood and music studies, Beck opens with influences on Nyman’s music by focusing on his 1977 In Re Don Giovanni, a work that recontextualizes and rearticulates the first 16 bars of Leporello’s catalogue aria through the lens of Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock. She then jumps to Nyman’s film scores, particularly Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (which relies heavily on Purcell’s music), Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Volker Schlöndorff’s The Ogre, before digging into the makeup of The Michael Nyman Band and its performance at the BBC Proms. Interspersed among her three foci of recontextualization of older music, film music, and popular-music influenced performative style, Beck has peppered choice anecdotes to demonstrate Nyman’s work outside of composition. We meet Steve Reich and hear how the famed minimalist convinced Nyman to return to composing after twelve years of music criticism, a time that resulted in the seminal book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. We observe Nyman taking photographs and video with small digital devices in Mexico City leading up to footage of his film Witness I. And we see him helping prepare and then perform at a festival of his music in Groningen in the Netherlands.

However, throughout these episodes though we seek a common thread to help us categorize the thrust, impact, and import of Nyman’s music, we never find it. That perspective, that thread, could have been delivered through interviews with his most important collaborators, particularly in film, but Beck only interviewed Volker Schlöndorff, who in his two minutes on camera clearly articulates the subtexts Nyman’s music brings to film and provides the most penetrating glimpse into Nyman’s significance of the whole documentary. Instead we are left with anecdotes and images that do not coalesce into a complete picture. For those who wish to understand Nyman’s aesthetic growth and the way his music functions, Pwyll ap Siôn’s excellent and highly-readable book The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts, is a far preferable resource. But fortunately for this package, Beck included Michael Nyman in Concert, a full-length concert performed at Studio Halle on October 22, 2009.

While Composer in Progress runs only 52 minutes and is available only in stereo, In Concert lasts almost an hour and a half and features the full performances excerpted in the documentary in Dolby and DTS surround sound. Nyman is firmly in the tradition of minimalists and postminimalists who have created their own ensembles, from...