Michael Nyman is one of the UK’s most innovative and celebrated composers. In addition to his prolific output as a composer, Nyman is also a conductor, pianist, writer, musicologist, photographer and film-maker.
In 1969 Nyman was commissioned to write the libretto for Sir Harrison Birtwistle's opera Down By The Greenwood Side. 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.
Nyman has also enjoyed a highly successful career as a film composer. 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. Other works include his enchanting music for Jane Campion's 1993 film, The Piano, the soundtrack album of which has sold more than three million copies. His music was used in the BAFTA award winning and Oscar nominated film, Man on Wire whilst his score for Erasing David (2009) was awarded Best Original Soundtrack at The London East End Film Festival.
More recently Michael has focused on composing soundtracks for silent films from the late 1920’s: Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice, Sergi Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and new soundtracks for three Dziga Vertov films- Man with a Movie Camera, The Eleventh Year and A Sixth Part of the World.
Over the past few years Nyman has produced and exhibited a series of multi-screen moving image installations, enhancing his international reputation as a composer with his work as a film-maker. Nyman’s large-scale film project War Work: 8 Songs with Film, commissioned by the War on Screen International Film Festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War, is a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war. The film draws together rare archive film material of the devastating trauma and destructive power of war on those who bore the impact of conflict and battle, with imagery by painters and artists who were both witness and victim.
Photo by Anne Deniau