Michael Nyman is on the phone from his hometown, London, talking about being well known and little known, all at the same time.
Nyman is famous for his music for films--especially his best-selling score for Jane Campion's "The Piano," and for scores to the infamous films of Peter Greenaway, such as "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover."
But he is also a composer in the "legitimate" music world. He has written for dance companies, for the opera stage, for orchestras and smaller ensembles.
"It's all interrelated," he says. It's just news to some people.
Which means it's fitting that Nyman will make his Los Angeles debut this week with not one but three very different events. At the core of his visit is a performance Friday at UCLA with the Michael Nyman Band--he'll be leading it from the piano--in a survey of his film music. Wednesday and Thursday, the band will perform with the Stephen Petronio Company in the full-evening dance piece "Strange Attractors"--Nyman provided the music for one of the work's three parts.
And on Tuesday night, Nyman turns his attentions to the art world. A quartet drawn from his band and soprano Sarah Leonard will perform his score for artist Mary Kelly's new installation at the Santa Monica Art Museum, "The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi."
Why the delayed debut in the town he visits often enough--to talk to agents and see friends--that he calls it "my second home"?
Nyman explained that "there was talk, three or four years ago, about doing a big film concert at the Hollywood Bowl, but there was a change of regime and it never happened. There was also talk of doing something with the L.A. [Philharmonic] and that didn't happen. So I seem to be caught between artistic regimes."
Of Friday's main attraction, he says, "I think it [will] be good to present film music in the film capital of the world, to a suspecting and an unsuspecting audience."
And the other projects? "'The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi' started as something I thought would be quite simple," Nyman said, but the complexity of the text has dictated otherwise. And the work for Petronio's famously physical dancers? "I think [people will] find the Petronio piece, the material itself, very different."
What listeners can expect is music that ranges between seemingly contradictory extremes, from sweeping neo-romantic sounds (the orchestrated soundtracks for "Gattaca" and "The End of the Affair") to Nyman's brand of Minimalism, in which overlapping lines and rhythms create a kinetic texture. Reviewers found his 1999 score for the film "Wonderland" "transcendent" and "glorious"; it "plucks at the heartstrings." A concert hall multimedia work, "The Commissar Vanishes," on the other hand, "hit like an express train."
Nyman doesn't acknowledge a gulf. "I'm not one of those composers who separates himself out in terms of manner or style or approach or language," he says. "I don't put on a different kind of musical suit or shirt when I become a film composer. Obviously, the demands are different, but the compositional process is more or less the same."
The L.A. event that Nyman seems most jazzed about is also his newest composition. On the day of the interview, the ink was still drying on his piece for Mary Kelly's installation.
Kelly, a Conceptual artist who teaches at UCLA, knows Nyman from her days in London, where her circle of friends also included Greenaway. This installation represents the first time she has incorporated music in her work.
The artwork is made up of a series of gray felt-like panels embossed with the text of "The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi," which Kelly wrote based on reports of an Albanian boy who was left for dead during the latest Balkans war, rescued by the Serbs and later reunited with his parents. Her medium is clothes-dryer lint--she fixes plastic letters onto the filter of a regular, everyday dryer to get the embossed effect.
Her text will be performed once live to Nyman's music in the gallery, and then a recording of the performance will be installed in a separate gallery. "It's not a fixed-piece performance. It's not music theater," Kelly says. "It's a score for an exhibition. That's the best way I can describe it."
Musically, Nyman said, "there are materials [in it] that are common to all four verses, a kind of refrain that is more or less the same, that separates the verses. But I think there is more dissimilar between the verses than similar. I found myself stopping after every line and making individual meaning and musical parallels [for] each line.
"That's brought out the best in me, not just the mechanistic sort of 'Michael Nyman writes a ballad' kind of thing. I sent Mary a fax saying this ballad has become a kind of anti-ballad."
Kelly likes the notion of reconfigured balladry. "The way I wrote it doesn't follow a literary form," she said. "I did give him some compositional notes, but I'm sure he ignored them," she added, laughing.
