Michael nyman band live biography
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Michael Nyman
English composer and pianist (born 1944)
This article is about the composer/musician Michael Nyman. For his eponymous album, see Michael Nyman (1981 album).
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944) is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores (many written during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmakerPeter Greenaway), and his multi-platinumsoundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.[1]
Early life and education
[edit]Nyman was born in
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Imagine pictures. Imagine "The Draughtsman's Contract". Imagine the Milton Keynes TV ad. And what do you hear? The music of Michael Nyman, both times. John Morrish investigates this unlikely-sounding combination.
MICHAEL NYMAN seizes the September issue of One Two Testing, opens it on his kitchen table, and becomes immersed in it.
"Just talk away and I'll sit reading this." he says. "Chords of the month... I might learn something from that."
And so I början my interview with the man who brought us the music for the brilliant spelfilm "The Draughtsman's Contract" (brilliant if controversial, I should say), for the Milton Keynes 'red balloon' advertisement, for David Nobbs' comedy "Fairly Secret Army", and much more.
For a good deal of the time he is simultaneously flicking through the magazine: later he starts glancing at the cricket on a television at the other end of the room. Strangely, his answers don't suffer from his divided attentions. They are admirably lucid and inom
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Nyman, Michael
What will history make of erstwhile Essex boy, outspoken critic, minimalist composer, experimental rock pianist, bandleader, visual artist and bespectacled Queen’s Park Rangers fan, Michael Nyman?
One of the most qualified musicologists to provide the answer might have been the composer himself, whose 1976 book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, gives an incisive account of the varied and changing musical landscape from 1950 to 1970. In it, Nyman reveals the democratic impulse to make music with minimal means – from the 4'33" silence of Cage to the Fluxus experiments of La Monte Young to its similarly anarchic expression in the work of Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra, in which Nyman himself played.
But the musicologist’s cogent analysis of British experimental music necessarily comes to an end when his own career as a composer is only just beginning: it was Nyman’s insights into the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, together wi