Michael Nyman plonks himself down in his grand old sitting room and announces
that he is tired. The composer was up at four to catch an early flight back
to London. Still, the 62-year-old looks pretty dapper, clad all in black and
with those trademark Chomond-ley-Warner specs.
Last night he was playing a concert in Cosenza (“good show, grim place”) way
down in the toe of Italy, steering the 12-piece Michael Nyman Band through
the bustling rhythms of The Draughtsman’s Contract and Drowning
by Numbers . Even after 20 years these scores, which have rather
outlived the films they accompanied, can still ruffle feathers. “It was a
subscription concert, so not everyone knew what to expect, and there were a
lot of biddies with dyed orange hair with their fingers in their ears,” he
smiles.
But Nyman still relishes life at the piano stool. “The energy and power coming
out of that band just . . . it sort of transcends time and space.”
Nyman will be ruffling more feathers when a commission for the BBC Symphony
Orchestra and Chorus receives its premiere next month. In fact, it’s a fair
bet that one former near-neighbour in the heartland of the liberal Islington
elite — Tony Blair — won’t be booking a ticket. Conceived as an antiwar
piece, it is based on an Iraqi poem from the Gulf War of 1991 that, after a
hard search for a copy, Nyman chanced upon in his local Borders. A
Handshake in the Dark was written by Jamal Jumá, an exiled poet living
in Denmark, and constitutes a series of imaginary letters to his younger
brother, a conscript captured by the Americans and whose whereabouts were
long unknown. The poetry graphically describes the pain and loss felt before
the brother’s eventual release.
The piece inevitably emerges as a protest at the current Iraqi conflict. “You
can’t live in this world without being disturbed and ashamed and disgusted
with the reason for the war starting,” Nyman says. “The way it has been
operated and the way that a whole civilisation has been destroyed and
corrupted.
“All hell has been let loose, with internal rifts that if Blair and Bush had
studied some five-year-old’s history book they would have realised were
going to happen.”
This is Nyman’s first piece addressing contemporary politics. One verse
imagines hideous tortures inflicted on the brother by Americans or Saudis.
What does the BBC think about it? “I don’t know. They haven’t said anything
to me. I’ve had not a whiff of angst or disapproval.”
Nyman says it is the hardest work he has written — partly because after it was
supposedly finished he learnt that there were 27 more unpublished verses to
try to slot into his work’s 35-minute span. “You’ve got a big choir, you’ve
got two, sometimes three, separate texts going on simultaneously. It’s been
a challenge and I’m curious to hear it for the first time.”
Not that the lad born to working-class parents in Chingford, East London, has ever
bucked a challenge. He won a place at the Royal Academy of Music but then
lost faith in modernism and abandoned composing to become a critic and
musicologist.
It was when he was asked to provide music for a production of Goldoni’s Il
Campiello that his writing took off again. The group he formed — “the
loudest unamplified street band I could imagine” — would become the Michael
Nyman Band. With its unholy alliance of saxophones, string quartet and bass
guitar, the group still performs 50 gigs a year. Indeed, Nyman’s work rate
overall is famously energetic. His latest opera, Love Counts , is
soon to be released on CD; a Mozart homage album is planned (“deliberately a
year late for the anniversary”); he has just recorded his violin concerto;
there’s a cello concerto under way, plus commissions to mark the reopening
of a hunting estate near Turin and another celebrating the Great North Run.
For the Venice Biennale he is setting some thoroughly pornographic
16th-century texts (“great fun”), and in the visual-art section he will show
some of his newly created films (photography is a burgeoning interest). The
soundtrack work that made his name and fortune is squeezed in as and when.
On top of all that, Nyman now runs his own record label, which is
“satisfying and frustrating in equal measure”.
Around us in his sitting-room is the evidence of a restless mind: piles of
books on genetics, Marx, art history, a stack of unhung paintings. There’s a
grand piano, of course, two toy pianos and, in pride of place, a display
cabinet filled with what turn out to be prewar fencing masks.
His working methods may puzzle the nonmusician. “I will have the radio and/or
television on. Writing music uses certain parts of the brain. I’m a football
addict and I can watch one match and listen to the commentary of another and
write music. This is part of my John Cage upbringing; he preaches
multiplicity of attention. Listening to spoken-word programmes seems to fill
up those parts of the brain that are not occupied with the process of
writing music.”
Nyman must be delighted, then, that the phone keeps ringing. He pauses. “No,
I’m waiting for the phone to ring for one thing — an opera. I have done four
or five [chamber] operas and I think I’m a good opera composer and I know
what music can and should do on stage.”
Nyman says he would like to tackle “a big social subject” on a big stage. So
why hasn’t the call come? I point out that where critics were once sniffy
about his chugging rhythms and the vast sentimental success of The Piano
(three million soundtrack CDs sold), recent works such as his intricate,
multilayered Love Counts or Man and Boy: Dada have been almost
universally admired. He sighs — and there’s just a hint of a man who sees
himself as an arts establishment outsider.
“It’s complicated. The film music has created a fantastic audience, a huge,
diverse audience . . . and also destroyed an audience. The film music opens
people’s ears to music they seem to love but equally, let’s say, The
Piano closes other people’s ears to what they think a classical composer
could or should do.
“It’s not just the critics, it’s orchestral managers, radio station
proprietors, Proms commissioners . . .”
He opts to change tack. “If I was still a critic I would find the Nyman
phenomenon very interesting. I was a critic who cut his teeth on very
serious music and I was an exact contemporary of John Tavener. When I saw
Tavener get involved with the Beatles and his album The Whale was
released I was very snooty. I fell into that trap.”
Time to go; Nyman has scores to write, records to sell. I offer my
commiserations about the sickly state of his football team, QPR. He has been
to see them only once this season — to watch them lose. Perhaps it’s lucky
he can’t spare the time.
A Handshake in the Dark, Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), Mar 8.
www.barbican.org.uk
Nyman: a life on the light side
1961-67 Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, mentored by
Thurston Dart, famed Baroque scholar. Instead of composing, he writes about
music.
1974 Releases Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond on the
influence of John Cage.
1976 Founds the Campiello Band (now the Michael Nyman Band).
1982 Receives acclaim for his score for the Peter Greenaway film The
Draughtman’s Contract.
1993 Wins contempt from his peers for his film score for The Piano,
as well as an Ivor Novello Award and over three million CD sales.
2002 Resident composer at Badische Staats theatre in Karlsruhe,
Germany.
2006 Collaborates with Hanif Kureishi and has the premiere of his opera
Love Counts. AMY KILPIN
