Michael nyman heavenly bodies movie#

Perhaps he began to warm up in order to differentiate himself from his erstwhile friend, Peter Greenaway. But he occasionally wonders if he might have mislaid his heart and conducts an absent-minded search for it. Nyman knows where his head is: it is what he would put his hat on, if he wore one.

One of his best recent film scores was for Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, about a brave new world of genetic mutants.

Because he inhabits a universe of disembodied notions and mental conundrums, his music suits the unrealised worlds of science fiction. This might be Nyman's guilty analysis of himself: he is both doctor and patient. The stricken singer in the opera, an expert at mental chess, 'dwells within schema' and 'has lost touch with the concrete world'. That's the diagnosis of the neurologist (modelled on Oliver Sacks) in Nyman's chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, when asked to treat the visual agnosia of a musician who can see shapes but not identify them. Beneath that egg-shaped dome, he presumably possesses 'a wonderful musical cortex'. Busy incubating ideas, his head has given up growing hair. His eyes are magnified by owlish spectacles. The man from whose brain all this jiving intellection emerged is slight and studiously monochrome. Meanwhile, his singers battled with the tricky tempo of a meditation on craniometry. 'Another year passes,' he said to me, 'and no commission from the Proms - and just look at the pathetic stuff they do commission.' 'Yes,' he said, 'I'm the commissar who vanishes, who's been effaced by the other cultural commissars.'Īlthough he is cherished by the European avant-garde, he grumbles about the dismissive attitude of the music establishment at home. It's as if he'd taken the entire score of The Messiah and repackaged it under the title Semele.' But despite his disdain for music which serves as lyrical confession, Nyman does have a secretive personal investment in this piece. He is cheekily proud of the process: 'Handel transposed music from one work to another, but he never did it quite on this scale. And Vertov's film, which is so mechanistic and propulsive, fits it exactly.'įor The Commissar Vanishes, he appropriated a score composed for a ballet about the fall of Icarus.

Michael nyman heavenly bodies movie#

'I never saw the game, because it has to be played on machines I'm not interested in, so I tried to imagine a silent movie that would suit the music I'd written. For Vertov's film, which the director called 'an experiment in visual music', showing how the camera refracts the reality of the industrial city, Nyman has adapted the apocalyptic zappings of the soundtrack he wrote for a Japanese video game, Enemy Zero. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.' That includes himself. An alto saxophone intermittently wails throughout The Commissar Vanishes, giving voice to the pain of those who have been annihilated.īoth scores are self-borrowings, a recycling of material invented for other purposes: Nyman proudly mocks the romantic cult of creativity and operates on the postmodern principle that there is nothing new in the world. He dealt with the Holocaust in his soundtrack for The Diary of Anne Frank and his settings of poems by the concentration-camp survivor Paul Celan.Īt London's Royal Festival Hall on 17 May, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Michael Nyman Band, he will play two scores to accompany films reflecting on different phases of another modernist revolution - The Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929, and the 'multi-video event' The Commissar Vanishes, based on David King's collection of Soviet photographs retouched to eliminate former allies purged by Stalin and reduced to non-persons.

He has also tackled the contentious ideologies that ravaged the twentieth century. Rather than giving vent to emotions, Nyman's music plays with ideas - the notion of speed in Musique à Grande Vitesse, which instigated an express rail link between Paris and Lille, or the idea of music itself, pitched somewhere between heavenly harmony and earthly uproar, in Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, his opera based on The Tempest. 'Nice rambunctious stuff, isn't it?' said Nyman as the synthesiser chugged. Revved up for the quintet, his singers jazzily doo-waahed their way through a lecture on the risks of genetic engineering and the possible manufacture of a biological underclass, with the contralto Hilary Summers adding a sceptical, bluesy postlude: 'But I don't understand,' she boomed.