Michael Nyman

Fate has often been less than perfectly kind to Michael Nyman. In 2008 his newspaper headlines moved from the arts section to the news when he fell down a Facebook mole trap dug by a disgruntled former lover, the Coronation Street actress Jane Slavin. We should be grateful that Franz Liszt did not have internet access to cause similar distractions from his art.

His most famous composition is a piano solo titled 'The Heart Asks Pleasure First' in Jane Campion's Academy Award-winning 1993 film The Piano, starring Holly Hunter. She played it herself on the screen, leaving Nyman with the consolation of performing it on the soundtrack and receiving royalties on the three million copies sold. The other mainstream movies he scored for, such as Gattaca (1997) and The Libertine (2005), were not as popular. He has written dozens of  soundtracks that were more successful artistically but less so commercially, particularly those of the flamboyant and painterly art film director Peter Greenaway. Not only did he create a score that could be noticed over the remorseless perversity and violence of 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, but Nyman churned out equally compelling and varied scores for ten of his other films, including A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his take on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's Books (1991). For The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), a murder mystery set in 1694 (a year before the mysterious death of Henry Purcell), Nyman wrote new melodies to bass riffs by the Baroque composer, elegantly parallelling the film's contemporary outlook within its period setting.

Nyman has long been a musicologist as much as a musician, having studied at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London. He spent several years as a music critic. His 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond examined those works of the 1950s and 60s whose "outcome was unknown", such John Cage's notorious 4' 33'' of silence. Nyman actually coined the now widespread term "minimalist" and even though the word could be used to describe his own music as much as Americans such as Philip Glass and Terry Riley, it rarely is: perhaps because his own pieces are so often brief and pummelling.

For all Nyman's success with film, he still declares his preference for writing operas. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986) was based on a case-study by the New York neurologist Oliver Sacks. This year he premiered an opera in Berlin titled Sparkie, based on a promotional recording produced by a bird seed company and concerning a talking budgerigar who was something of a celebrity in the UK until becoming an ex-budgerigar in 1962. He is currently working on a new opera commissioned in honour of the 80th birthday of Ennio Morricone, another prolific composer with both classical and experimental influences, also known widely for films with a single director (the spaghetti western king Sergio Leone).

In 1976 Nyman founded the Campiello Band, now called the Michael Nyman Band, with which he tours and records. Its eleven musicians play strings, brass, piano and a bass guitar. Their precise ensemble playing delivers a tight, arresting sound that leaves audiences exhilarated. Nyman's many talents are still only narrowly appreciated. See him this month as band leader, composer and pianist at his one Sydney concert.

The Michael Nyman Band plays at the Opera House on Sun 26 Jul.

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