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WUNDERKAMMER TRIO | MICHAEL
NYMAN
Wunderkammer Trio plays Nyman's
Michael Nyman was born in London on 23 March, 1944 and his musical education was at the Royal Academy of Music (where he studied composition under Alan Bush) and King's College. At the latter Thurston Dart was Nyman's professor from 1961 to 1965. Dart, a renowned scholar of the Baroque, was to have a formative and lasting impact on his student's approach both to his composing techniques and his use of source material (it was Dart who inspired Nyman to visit Romania, collecting folk songs that he would eventually use many years later). However, when Nyman graduated from King's in the mid-Sixties, he felt out of step with the contemporary (post-serial) classical orthodoxy of the time. Rather than fall into line, Nyman instead entered a phase of writing (as critic and musicologist) for The Spectator, The Listener and the New Statesman. True to the barrier-breaking mood of the time, his subjects ran the gamut from a lengthy meditation on the closing riff of Hey Jude to Stockhausen and Cardew, calling at all points in between. It was during this time (on the 11th of October, 1968) that he transposed the term minimalism from the art world and applied it to the music of Cardew, Reich and Riley. In addition to writing, Nyman was at this point performing with Steve Reich, the Flying Lizards, the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Another stalwart of this scene, Gavin Bryars, introduced Nyman to the joys (and otherwise) of Queen's Park Rangers, instigating a continuing fascination with football as a performance/event has resulted in a canon of Michael Nyman works. In 1974 he published the (still) definitive volume on the music he considered to be the way forward from (or around) the didactic Darmstadt serialists such as Boulez and Stockhausen. Experimental Music-Cage and Beyond was Nyman setting out his musical stall, and a printed paradigm for the Michael Nyman Band. Among other things it expounded how Cage had in effect given permission to treat the (musical) past as a collection of raw resources to be plundered and re-shaped at will. With the Nyman vision of the consequences of such freedom laid out so clearly and persuasively, it wasn't long before someone sampled his wares. That someone was Harrison Birtwistle, who as Director of Music at the National Theatre, asked Nyman to arrange music for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's play Il Campiello. Nyman's response was a bizarre ensemble of acoustic instruments from the ancient (rebecs, sackbuts and shawms) to the eccentric (a banjo?) to play Venetian gondoliers' songs at maximum possible volume, something like the Clash a la Serenissima. Nyman was taking music from another century and applying a modern aesthetic to it.' He wanted to keep the Campiello players together, and so started to develop a repertoire for what would evolve into the Michael Nyman Band. The most important composition from this time, a kind of mission statement for Michael Nyman PLC, was In Re Don Giovanni (1976) which still holds its place in the Band's programme two decades later. Taking sixteen bars of the Catalogue Song from Mozart's opera, it wryly deconstructed them into a totally new work. It contained all of the elements which would dominate the early Band-use of found sound, dense layering, repeated passages and the bright, jaunty dynamic. It also displayed what Nyman calls the rock'n'roll ethos' in its use of urgent rhythms and the violin/piano styling (to this day Nyman lays claim to a style derived from Jerry Lee Lewis, although some weird and wonderful mutation has obviously occurred along the way). Nyman's breakthrough to a larger public came with his memorable music for Peter Greenaway's film, The Draughtsman's Contract, in 1982, although the pair had started collaborating five years earlier. The creative partnership, and friendship, thrived on their love of games-musical, visual and temporal-lists, reduction, repetition, and number theories. Draughtsman is a baffling baroque fantasia, concerned more with form than content. Greenaway's decorative living tableaux are overlaid with those abrasive, pumping rhythms of Nyman, as he playfully applied that modern aesthetic, on this occasion to the ground basses of Henry Purcell. Again, the results proved to have a healthy longevity and Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds and An Eye for Optical Theory remain popular fixtures of the live repertoire. The double act continued with A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Drowning by Numbers (1986), the score for the latter a masterly stripping down and rebuilding of the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola KV 364. Not only did Nyman analyse and then re-formed the basic material with mathematical precision into wholly new rhythmic and harmonic variations. He was also at great pains to document what he has done. "I suppose I am still an academic at heart. And I like to show off a bit." But such honesty and openness about his sources and the composing process, however, gave ammunition to those who determined to dismiss this vigorous (and, even worse, popular) music as parasitic on other composers. "Yet these people have no concept of the tradition I am following, of how Bach used Vivaldi, for instance." The Greenaway-Nyman partnership dissolved (or "became quiescent" as Nyman says) following the take on the Tempest that was Prospero's Books (1991), when the director fiddled with the soundtrack, adding ill-judged electronic doodlings to what was already a fully-formed, vocal-led score of real beauty. In retrospect the underlining of the partnership as closed was probably a good thing for Nyman. The continued perception of him as Greenaway's house composer was, as he had feared, tending to overshadow his other achievements, which were increasingly concentrating on the concert hall rather than celluloid. In 1986 a newspaper review of Dr Oliver Sack's book on bizarre neurological dysfunctions, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, led to a chamber opera based on the text. The man was Viennese musician Dr P, whose visual world was bereft of meaning. He really could confuse his wife's head for his own hat-a condition known as visual agnosia-unless he could musicalise it', inventing songs-eating songs, going out songs, dressing songs-to bring order to chaos. The real Dr P was a devotee of Schumann, and using fragments of his work Nyman undertook a musical journey, full of both pathos and humour, that paralleled the patient's descent into a song-centred twilight zone. The idea of an interfacing with the real world through music would, of course, reappear as a major theme in the form of Ada in The Piano. A highly idiosyncratic musical style with strong elements of rhythm and repetition was bound to attract dancers, and Nyman has collaborated with a number of choreographers and dance companies on projects such as The Fall of Icarus (1989) and La Princesse de Milan (1991, a further exploration of The Tempest) later reworked as an opera-ballet (Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs in 1995). Other dance-related pieces include the daunting solo violin piece Zoo Caprices (derived from the score for a Zed and Two Noughts, 1985) and And They Do (both available on a 1989 disc) and a piece called Configurations (aka Miniatures) for the Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh. This latter became the String Quartet No 2 (1988). Nyman says that although he wanted the piece rooted in South Indian rhythms, it was in no way to sound Indian, and so overlaid the Karnatic core with his own melodic and harmonic ideas. The Indo-European fusion gave a fresh take on Nyman, the conflict between the piece's two underlying musical traditions and its dual requirements (dance/concert) resulting in a freer wheeling piece than the first string quartet. In fact over the next few years following the String Quartet No 2, the rigid geometry that characterised early Nyman softened. The haunting String Quartet No 3 (1989) grew from the soundtrack to a BBC documentary called Out of the Ruins, about the Armenian earthquake. Taking as its basis a choral work, the original soundtrack, translating it to a string quartet and then overlaying of Romanian source material from his 1965 journey, its inclusion inspired by Nyman watching the scenes of Ceausescu's overthrow on television. The work also formed the basis of his score for Carrington (1995). Romania is also present in Nyman's setting of Six Celan Songs (1990) for German singer Ute Lemper. Although the poet's birthplace, Czernowitz, Bukovina had been in Austria until 1919, by the time he was born a year later the borders had moved, and he was a Romanian Jew. Celan's parents died in the death camps, he survived in a work camp, and until his death (probably by suicide) in 1970 he chronicled in his bleak poetry the struggle (and guilt) of survivors to come to terms with the holocaust. The song cycle packs a hefty emotional clout, Lemper reaching out for a greater vocal (and emotive) range than usual, and Nyman again opting for a lush, lyrical sweep, but with an unsettling, searching quality. The new, less dense colourings were also at the heart of the soundtrack for Jane Campion's film The Piano (1992), the score that projected Nyman to some kind of international stardom (the album has sold 800,000 and counting), and given him a reputation in some quarters as a sensitive interpreter of the female psyche. (This has resulted in a commission to provide the score that will humanise Laura the Astronaut, star of a digitally generated interactive CD-Rom currently being developed by Japanese games master Iino.) The Piano, however, still displayed at least two of Nyman's core tenets-the merging of the popular and the serious, and the bringing of modern composing sensibilities to existing music of the past. So he created a repertoire for Ada based on the Scottish folk songs of the mid-19th century that she would have carried in her head, but applying Nyman criteria to the source material, and therefore updating it to the late 20th century. The fact that music which is a major dramatic component of a film did not receive even an nomination for an Oscar is baffling still. At the time Nyman was surprised that he let those wistful, evocative melodies plucked from 19th century obscurity (not many of us whistled Bonny winter's noo awa or Bonnie Jean prior to the movie) have such an easy time of it, but he has not let them rest in peace. Because Ada was not a technically accomplished piano player, Nyman deemed that the original score had to have a certain modesty' to it, so by 1994 he had re-fashioned the material into the Piano Concerto, with a more taxing keyboard part and the rather bitty cues of the soundtrack placed in a coherent, more dynamic structure. It has also provided the basis for Lost and Found, for saxophone and strings and a vocal work, The Piano Sings. There is a continuing exploration of the Piano and its sources. In April 1995 the Camillia Quartet premiered the String Quartet No 4, dedicated to his compositional teacher Alan Bush (who died October 31, 1995). Like the previous three string quartets, the latest had a rather tortuous gestation. It owes its starting point to Yamamoto perpetuo (1993), a demanding virtuoso solo violin work (subsequently recorded by Alexander Balanescu) commissioned by the Japanese designer for a show that was themed around Cinderella. Yohji Yamamoto wanted the piece to include some European folk music, and Nyman recruited the popular Scottish tunes that had not found their way into The Piano. The Yamamoto piece now forms, as Nyman says, the lock, double stop and bariolage' of the first violin part in the new quartet. Nyman's next piece (for Seville Expo '92) immediately following The Piano could be seen as a deliberate attempt to distance himself from Ada's romanticism and return to a more familiar stamping ground, but The Upside Down violin was actually composed in tandem with the score for Campion's film. The inspiration was Andaluz, a style of music derived from the Moorish invasion of Spain. It is based on the ala, a raga-like song that would have echoed around the water gardens and courtyards of the Alhambra, and which is still played by a few Moroccan ensembles such as the Orqesta Andaluzi de Tetuoan. The Orqesta's eclectic collection of instruments, including lutes, rebab fiddles and qanun zithers echoed the Campiello band. Unlike String Quartet No 2, The Upside Down Violin, performed by the Orqesta plus the Nyman band in front of 5,000 people at the Expo wears its swirling cross-cultural world music' credentials on its sleeve. Such commissions for festivals and celebrations are not unusual for Nyman, especially from Continental Europe, where they seem to appreciate his popular/serious duality more readily than the UK. His La Traversee de Paris (1989) was composed for the celebrations of the bicentenary of the French revolution, and his pulsing, restless musical journey MGV (Musique a Grand Vitesse, 1993) came from the Festival de Lille, to celebrate the Paris-Lille high speed rail link (British Rail made do with a Nyman-scored advertisement). The link with Expo is set to continue in 1998 with an opera to be premiered in Lisbon based on the life and work of Portuguese poet Fernando Peesoa. Increasingly individual players keen to expand the repertoire for their instrument will approach Nyman. In 1996 he wrote a Trombone Concerto for Christian Lindberg, derived from a dissertation by EP Thomson called Rough Music describing how in the past villagers would hound malefactors out of the locale with noise, mainly from banging found percussion. In the piece the Nyman set the trombone as the protagonist, supported by the brass, but pursued and harassed by the woodwind and metal percussion (in the form of ex-BBC filing cabinets). The grid laid down by the beaten metal (which in the first performance turned out to be ex-BBC filing cabinets) has a suitably found sound provenance, being extracted from an eight beat pattern (varying to seven or nine) generated by the QPR crowd in a game against Newcastle United. Football also provided the inspiration for the 1996 After Extra Time album (AET, the composition, shares a name with his wife), which brought together the various soccer-inspired pieces, such as The Final Score ( ), that Nyman has written over the years, and also resulted in a tour of Euro'96 venues. 1996 also sees one new score for Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre, Nyman has dispensed with strings for a brassy, militaristic feel (much of the action takes place in and around Goering's hunting lodge and a Hitler Youth school). Schlondorff and Nyman are both keen to expand the score into an opera. The Ogre deals partly with themes that will reappear in another opera, premiered in a basic workshop form in 1987, now due to be performed in 1997 (to celebrate 15 years of the ICA), called Vital Statistics. The source material is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, and the opera explores the way measurement, grading, and statistics can be used to bolster human prejudices, be it in the fields of racist mythologies (hence the link with The Ogre), intelligence, art or politics. The demand for Nyman from film and concert hall shows no sign of slowing, nor does his capability of fulfilling that demand. 1997 will also see the Philharmonia's unveiling of The Mazda Concerto, a double concerto for cello (Julian Lloyd Webber) and saxophone (John Harle) where Nyman will explore conflict and resolution between two very different players. In the meantime there is that new departure into films on mambo maestro Edmundo Ros, the Kobe earthquake (the band played the city shortly before it was flattened), a small 16th century church in Cantabria (a region where an ancient instrument called the rabel-a variation of the Campiello's rebec-survives) and the folk music of Okinawa. Here, Nyman may produce an album by Nenes, a group who not only perform the island's traditional folk music, but apply its aesthetic and sound (more Hawaiian than Japanese) to modern pop songs such as No Woman, No Cry. It isn't hard to see the attraction for him. It is now two decades since the Campiello Band took some old Gondoliers songs by the scruff of the neck and began the metamorphosis into the Michael Nyman Band. It is hard to remember now how startling the early Band performances seemed, because much of the Nyman musical language and processes have passed into common usage. Yet Nyman still finds fresh things to say within his marked territory, is still open to the possibilities that may lie in a chance remark or encounter. Twenty years after he published Experimental Music, Nyman is still exploring the and beyond' part of his book's title.
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