The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (review)

The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts is the first book-length publication on any British experimentalist since Michael Nyman’s own Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (2d ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; first edition, London: Studio Vista, 1974). For that reason alone, it is welcome: the British musical establishment has not exactly embraced British experimentalism and its associated postmodernism. America eventually celebrated its own experimentalism and minimalism, especially from Ives to Cage, and from Young and Riley to its own “post-minimalists,” as part of American studies. Thus, although there are experts in American experimentalism working in British universities, there are no full-time specialists in British experimental music, bar Keith Potter (whose major work centers on American minimalism). In fact, experimental music has not always been accepted in Britain as music; although Schirmer Music published Experimental Music in the United States in 1974, its first British publisher, as noted above, was the visual arts firm Studio Vista.

Michael Nyman came to his own post-minimal style through a wide range of experiences. He studied composition with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music, but disillusioned with the composition styles prevalent at the time, studied musicology with Thurston Dart at King’s College, London, where he specialized in seventeenth-century music. In the late 1960s, Nyman built a reputation as a critic. He became friendly with members of the “Manchester Group,” especially Harrison Birtwistle, for whom he wrote the libretto of Down by the Greenwood Side (1969). Nyman had an almost Pauline conversion while reviewing Paragraph 1 of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968–71):

I just fell for it hook, line and sinker. I got personally involved with that crowd [the British experimentalists], and left the Maxwell Davies-Stockhausen new music thing behind (though I probably carried on reviewing it) and became personally involved and involved as a performer with Scratch Orchestra, Portsmouth Sinfonia, [and other experimental ensembles]” (“The Power of the Cadence,” interview by Robert Davidson, London, 1999 [ http://www.topologymusic.com/articles/nyman.htm ], accessed 23 May 2008).

Nyman documented British and American experimentalism and minimalism (he coined the term “minimal” in his Spectator review of Paragraph 1), both in Experimental Music and in further articles, mostly in general-interest magazines and visual arts journals. Although Nyman composed some pieces before what he called his “rebirth” as a composer (unpublished interview by the present writer, London, 23 March 1983), notably his album Decay Music (Obscure 6, 1976), his full-time composition work began with a piece of practical musicology, arranging seventeenth-century street songs for a production of Carlo Goldoni’s Il campiello at the National Theatre. Nyman kept the pit band together, writing new music for the Campiello Band (later the Michael Nyman Band). Since the 1980s, Nyman is probably best known for his film music, through his long association with Peter Greenaway and his popular theme for Jane Campion’s film, The Piano (1993).

Pwyll ap Siôn brings a careful and enthusiastic eye to Nyman’s music after his “rebirth.” In chapter 4, “Mapping Intertextuality in Nyman,” ap Siôn clearly outlines a methodology with origins in structuralism, and emphasizes materials as the basis for analysis, especially the scores themselves. He notes that Roland Barthes preferred the term “text” to “work” for reasons of provisional relationships (p. 61), which has a direct parallel within experimental and postmodern aesthetics. Barney Childs, an early writer on indeterminacy, also avoided the term “work” because of its romantic sense of permanence and identity; Jonathan Kramer saw a similar lack of permanence and autonomy in postmodern music (“The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” Current Musicology no. 66 [Spring 1999]: 10). ap Siôn establishes an intertextual typology that is specific to Nyman himself, with categories that cover sources (pre-existing music, separated into music written by Nyman and those written by others...