Decay Music (1976) – MICHAEL NYMAN

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 filmmaker Peter Greenaway), and his multi-platinum soundtrack 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.

Nyman was born in Stratford, London, to a family of secular Jewish furriers who immigrated from Poland.

Nyman was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow. He studied from 1961 until 1967 at King’s College London, and at the Royal Academy of Music until 1967 with Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, focusing on piano and seventeenth-century baroque music. He won the Howard Carr Memorial Prize for composition in July 1964. In 1965–66 Nyman secured a residency in Romania to study folk-song, supported by a British Council bursary.

Nyman says he discovered his aesthetic by playing the aria “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni on his piano in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis, which “dictated the dynamic, articulation and texture of everything I’ve subsequently done.” It subsequently became the base for his 1977 piece In Re Don Giovanni.

His 1976 album Decay Music was produced by Brian Eno. In 1974 Nyman published an influential book on experimental music called Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, which explored the influence of John Cage on classical composers.