Film music, operas, orchestra commissions, touring, starting up his own record label ... The list of Michael Nyman projects goes on and on. Despite that, the unconventional composer claims that he's not in much demand - 'If I get two offers a year that's pretty good'. Shane Hegarty goes straight to the source
MICHAEL NYMAN glowers as he answers the door of his Islington house, snaps "Young man!" Sorry I'm late. ice on plane's wing... train late... walk from station... sorry... very sorry.
"I have a lot of work to do," he scolds as he ushers me into the house. "I'll have to talk very quickly."
The room is comfortably disordered. There are notes on the floor, scattered objets d'art and paintings, an award peeking out from behind the coffee table. A large cabinet houses four rows of fencing masks. There is a grand piano at the back and, curiously, two toy pianos in the centre of the room.They look a little small for him to be plonking himself at.
I hold my coat for a moment in the hope that I might be pointed towards a stand. But I'm not, so I fold it and place it over my bag on the floor.
It's a bitterly cold day outside, and even in the cosiness of Nyman's townhouse this could be a somewhat chilly encounter.
Not a bit of it. Nyman relaxes into the interview immediately. He is as genial as he is articulate and seems more than happy to talk for as long as you're happy to listen. Later, when I suggest I might be holding him from his work, he tells me that I've come a long way and to ask what I need to.
"I just wanted to make you feel uncomfortable," he jibes about his initial greeting. Well, he's actually been most welcoming. "Damn it," he says, slapping the armrest in mock annoyance.
Nyman wasn't joking, though, when he said he was busy. The next day he will record the score of Tristram Shandy, Michael Winterbottom's film version of Lawrence Sterne's kaleidoscopic novel. Then to Germany for the premiere of a new opera, Love Counts. Asia follows for a new commission with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Then back to Ireland, when he brings the Michael Nyman Band to Cork and Dublin.
His own record label will debut at the end of the month with his previous opera, Man and Boy: Dada. He is writing a soundtrack for The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp as a 17th-century earl. The toy pianos, it turns out, are indeed for him; he's writing for Margaret Leng Tan, a virtuoso on this most unusual of instruments.
Nyman's work routine is simple. "All the time. As much as possible." He has written music for a computer game and a new train line, so what's the selection process?
"Well, most things are decided for you. I've been banging on about the Tristram Shandy opera since 1981 and I've not persuaded anyone to commission it. It's my favourite novel, you see, and I've written about 50 minutes of music over the last 20 years. And suddenly Michael Winterbottom sends me the script for a film version.
"Because the book is about the process of writing a book, then the film is about the process of writing a film. So, the soundtrack uses pre-existing soundtrack music. Something from Barry Lyndon, some Nino Rota, Schumann's piano quintet from Fanny & Alexander and a couple of tracks from The Draughtsman's Contract. So it's obvious I would be the man to do it."
Film work has made Nyman one of the best known, and best-selling, living composers. His relatively conventional score for The Piano made a fortune, but his early work with Peter Greenaway made his reputation. He employed folk and early music to form an idiosyncratic but compulsive style that became his signature.
Now most associated with Winterbottom, perhaps most successfully with a fine score for Wonderland, he also features in 9 Songs, about which he has quipped: "I'm very pleased to be in the most sexually explicit film in British film history, especially as I am not doing anything sexual."
Yet, Nyman claims not to be in much demand. "It's kind of interesting to think, with the number of films I've done and the kind of attention those have got, that I'm inundated with offers, but I'm not. If I get two offers a year that's pretty good."
Experiences vary. "Sometimes you do a film score and it's absolutely right, no questions asked. And sometimes you write music which asks questions of both film and director and of score." Jane Campion wanted none of "that Greenaway shit" in The Piano. He persuaded Neil Jordan to allow some sex into the otherwise penitential The End of the Affair. He loved working with Conor McPherson on The Actors, regardless of the movie's success.
Lawrence Dunmore, director of The Libertine, came to Nyman's house and told him he could write whatever score he wanted. If only.
"Reality kind of takes over and the film takes on a shape of its own, a life of its own, and this kind of open invitation to write anything becomes a more closed invitation to write anything. And once you've written what you've written, they suggest other things."
He listens to movies as much as watches them; was really annoyed by the Sideways soundtrack, but believes others to be "absolutely unimpeachable, unimprovable, unapproachable. Most Morricone scores; most Bernard Herrmann scores; some Carter Burwell scores."
Nyman wouldn't mind a go at a big action movie, and he was telling David Arnold that just last week, at - he rolls his eyes at how pretentious this will sound - a party thrown by the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
"I said to him that I kind of envied what he's done with the Bond films. But he said when you've done it once it becomes kind of routine. The initial joy had worn off and he's now happy doing cheap little theatre plays." It doesn't put Nyman off. "I'd love the ability to make oversized gestures. Because when you think of Wonderland, The End of the Affair, Warrington, Gattaca, it's all sort of intimate, chamber music."
Does he see himself a populariser of modern classical music? "I'm only in it for myself," he declares. "I'm very lucky. I sit down and write the music I write and it happens to please film directors and please audiences.
"There's a slight difference between the independent culture of writing an opera and the kind of dependency culture of a soundtrack, because you have to do something that fits the project and the style and taste of the director. But I never write a single note where I think, well if I do it this way it'll grab that audience and if I do it the other way then no one's going to listen to it."
Nyman's record label, MN Records, run with the aid of Irish industry veteran Declan Colgan, will release both new and older Nyman compositions.
"It's kind of thrilling, because what I'm doing is insane given the state of the record business, given the fact that everyone is bemoaning classical music not selling. I'm not only setting up a label to sell a product that nobody buys, and in a CD format, but I'm also bucking the trend in that instead of doing one dutiful album a year, I might release 10."
The back catalogue will no longer be spread across several labels, depending on the genre, and he won't have to work with several different PR people with no interest in linking it all up. Under one label he hopes that people who liked The Piano will look towards works such as the challenging Man and Boy: Dada. "I am not composer A when I write a soundtrack and composer B when I write a string quartet and composer C when I write an opera. It's all me."
Now 60, Nyman misses a youthful innocence he once brought to his work, but sees it as part of his evolution path. "In the early 80s, late 70s I wrote in the only way I knew how, so everything was at the extreme of my musical knowledge, attitude, technical expertise." Thirty years on, he likens his portfolio to a growing "archaeological site", from which he can pick sounds and ideas. "Sometimes I don't have time to revisit my own cliches, because I'm busy creating new ones."
Recent work with Limerick-based composer Jurgen Simpson has him particularly enthused. Collaborating on an electronic piece for choreographerShobana Jeyasingh, Simpson made a grateful Nyman into an electronic composer and blew away his suspicions about technology.
"I was in his house in a village outside Limerick and I was sitting on the sofa, orchestrating Love Counts, and I'm thinking: 'Saxophone: boring. Violin: boring'. And he was over on one side of the room processing and processing. Suddenly my music was coming alive with sound.
"In the past, things that weren't blown or scraped or hit I found were rather lacking in texture, body and reality. But these programmes and the kind of sound world that Jurgen's music made was suddenly much more exciting than the kind of flabby sound of instruments. So in this one small room there was the old," Nyman raises his hands to in self-acknowledgement. "And there was the new. So I'm really kind of hooked on electronics through Jurgen."
This came after Nyman and his girlfriend had spent a summer trip driving around Ireland, trying to cram everything in and stumbling upon a Burren landscape he had no idea was so beautiful. His first instinct was to pack up and move there. "It was really kind of mind-blowing." So he's particularly relishing these Irish shows, at which his 12-piece will play a selection from his musical scores. The theatricality of playing live thrills him."Doing the same kind of programme all over the world is interesting and all that feeds in to how I play. Sometimes if there's no response I get a sense of frustration. You get the head down and think, why the fuck am I doing this? Other times you think, maybe I have to work a bit harder to get a response even though it may not be tangible to the audience. That generates a different response from me and from the players and therefore hits the audience over the head differently. So even though we're playing music I wrote in 1983, it still has a life and I still enjoy playing it."
As a critic for the Spectator in the 1970s, Nyman coined the term 'minimalism'. Today, his critics complain that his music can be predictable and his operas average at best, but he is dismissive of many of them.
"Reviews that assess what the composer's done in its own terms and broadly speaking in its own cultural terms, if someone tries to understand it, then fine. But generally the bad reviews are kind of ignorant and contentious and prejudiced. So who cares? I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm sitting here talking to you and I'm writing more music than I have time to write. And I'm about to lose my shirt on starting my own record label. But who cares? I have more shirts. I have a lot of shirts."
What would Nyman the critic say of Nyman the composer? "I could write that he's the most fantastic composer since the invention of composition on the one hand. And also tear the shit out of myself on the other hand. So I won't do it."
The Michael Nyman Band plays the Cork Opera House on April 11th and the National Concert Hall, Dublin on April 12th
