Michael Nyman

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944) is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores (many written during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway), and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music. Early life and education Nyman was born in Stratford, London, to a family of secular Jewish furriers who immigrated from Poland. Nyman was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow. He studied from 1961 until 1967 at King's College London, and at the Royal Academy of Music until 1967 with Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, focusing on piano and seventeenth-century baroque music. He won the Howard Carr Memorial Prize for composition in July 1964. In 1965–66 Nyman secured a residency in Romania to study folk-song, supported by a British Council bursary. Career