11th December 2011 – Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds from The Draughtsman’s Contract by Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman is a very prolific composer and one who has fascinated me for many years (I did my undergraduate dissertation analysing his opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, first performed in 1986). He is also a musicologist and it was he who invented the term minimalism in the 1960s. Michael Nyman formed his own band in 1976 which is still going today and it is with this group that he explores many of his compositional ideas. He directs the band himself from the piano (as you will see in the youtube clip) and there is an unusual combination of instruments involved. The Draughtman’s Contract (released in 1982) was the first film score that Nyman wrote and was the first of a dozen that he did with the director Peter Greenaway. He also wrote the music for The Piano (1993) and has composed for symphony orchestras, choirs, string quartets and other chamber ensembles and ballet music as well.
In some of his works, Nyman uses a technique where he will take melodies or chord progressions from another composer who is relevant to the setting of the music and rework it extensively into his own style. The Draghtman’s Contract was set in 1694 (the Baroque era) and Nyman used Purcell‘s music as a starting point. Likewise in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, based on the neurological study by Oliver Sacks, the man of the title was a singer who could still sing his Schumann songs despite his neurological problems; therefore Schumann Lieder are woven through Nyman’s music, although you have to dig pretty deeply to find it in places!
