Michael Nyman View Sheet Music for this Artist
Biography
Nyman studied music composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1969, he provided the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, Down by the Greenwood Side and directed the short film Love Love Love before settling into music criticism, where he is generally acknowledged to have been the first to apply the term "minimalism" to music (in a 1968 article in The Spectator magazine about the English composer Cornelius Cardew). He wrote introductions for George Frideric Handel's Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 and conducted the most important interview with George Brecht in 1976.
Nyman, who had studied with the noted Baroque music scholar Thurston Dart at King's College London, drew frequently on early music sources in his scores for Greenaway's films: Henry Purcell in The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (which included Memorial and Miserere Paraphrase), Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber in A Zed and Two Noughts, Mozart in Drowning by Numbers, and John Dowland in Prospero's Books.
Michael Nyman - Numbers
Nyman's popularity increased significantly after he wrote the score to Jane Campion's award-winning 1993 film The Piano. The album became a classical music best-seller. Although Nyman's score was central to the movie, he did not receive an Academy Award nomination despite being nominated for both a British Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He has scored numerous other films, the majority of them art films from Europe. His few forays into Hollywood composing have been Gattaca, Ravenous (with musician Damon Albarn), and The End of the Affair. He wrote settings to various texts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for "Letters, Riddles, and Writs", part of Not Mozart. He has also produced a soundtrack for the silent film Man with the Movie Camera.
Michael Nyman Sheet Music
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