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

This is the first published book-length study of Michael Nyman, and to date by far the most substantial contribution to Nyman research. There have been a couple of dissertations on his film scores, and on the music for The Draughtsman's Contract in particular, but beyond that only individual articles (many in German rather than English).

That it took so long for such a study to be written might seem surprising, given the fact that Nyman shot to fame far beyond specialist art-music circles in the 1980s, by now a generation ago. One could speculate that his position between art music and films that were (though still art-house) fairly popular for a while has been one reason for scholarly reluctance: Nyman is hard to pin down, and to deal with him satisfactorily requires engagement with his musical origins in British experimentalism, with the influences from popular music that Nyman brought to bear on the experimentalist ideas, and with the conditions of working in the collaborative enterprise of film - not normally overlapping fields in the expertise of individual musicologists. On the other hand, British experimentalism has not been served at all well by scholarly literature, and perhaps it is precisely Nyman's place between stools that has made him intriguing enough to produce a body of research far beyond that allotted to any of his experimental colleagues from the 1960s and 1970s.

This may not endear him any further to those who think that he has made his career beyond the paradise garden of experimental music by repeatedly delving into the same bag of cheap tricks. But some of the examples of Nyman criticism ap Siôn cites in his first chapter, in order to get this problem out of the way, are so hilariously vituperative and no-holds-barred that they serve to make a more general point: the traditions of (thinking about) art and popular music are still nowhere near as close together as they will need to be before a comprehensive history of twentieth-century music can be written, and those that cross the boundaries still cause a lot of intellectual confusion. Ap Siôn quotes Meirion Bowen, who once stated that if Nyman 'has any status as a composer at all - and that I doubt - he has acquired it by steadily annihilating all past composers, from Purcell and Mozart onwards (2)¹ - 'annihilating' instead of 'using' or even 'abusing', and not some composers, but 'all past composers'. Nothing but the language of apocalypse will do to evoke the enormity of the Nyman threat, and to fend it off in the process.

Bowen's doubt that Nyman is a composer at all is just one example of a wider critical reaction (see ibid.), and one that echoed Schoenberg's dictum that the music of Kurt Weill was the only music in the world wherein he could detect no quality at all,² and Theodor Adorno's statement - in his obituary for Weill, no less - that the Weill who composed Broadway musicals in the USA could hardly described by the term 'composer' anymore.³ Not accidentally, Nyman's 'enthusiasm for collaborative projects' (xviii) mirrors Weill, who averred in 1927 that in order to be able to work fruitfully within contemporary culture, (art music) composers had first 'to overcome their timid dread of truly equal collaborators'.⁴ The idea that the supposedly parasitic and surprisingly popular borrowing and adaptation of material from other composers diminished Nyman's status as a composer makes one also realise that it was perfectly possible to sleep through the heyday of postmodernism, or at least to fix one's blinkers so firmly that not much got past them; and perhaps the years between the apex of Nyman's popular success and Pwyll ap Siôn's book were necessary in order to get beyond the passions of that moment in cultural history. That ap Siôn finds it still necessary to spell out his argument that 'critical...