Michael Nyman Composes a ‘Piano’ Success : Movies: Britain’s new-music man wins acceptance with the Jane Campion film’s score after years of Establishment resistance.

The latest buzz from the New York new-music scene, the unprecedented topic of intermission conversation one hears these days at the ultra-hip Brooklyn Academy of Music as well as at downtown alternative spaces, goes something like this:

The much admired, awarded and internationally popular new Jane Campion film, “The Piano,” is regularly mentioned as prime Oscar material. So, since it is a film about music and since the soundtrack album has attracted considerable interest from Warsaw to Sidney, isn’t it just possible that the composer, Michael Nyman, could also be nominated for an Academy Award?

Speculation about Oscars is, of course, the daily fodder in Hollywood. And speculation is all that this talk is. But, still, it is speculation new to new music, or at least new to it since Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson wrote soundtracks in the ‘30s.

The one thing that is certain, Nyman, a British composer who for years has had a devoted cult following but has never reached a wider mainstream, has, at long last, arrived. His ensemble, the Michael Nyman Band, has yet to perform in the United States. But the bustle in his hotel room, during a visit to Manhattan for the premiere of “The Piano” at the New York Film Festival last month, the juggling of meetings with record companies and concert presenters and the press, was not that of an obscure composer.

Nyman is best known as the composer of the music for several arty Peter Greenaway films, including “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” and “Prospero’s Books.” That music, attention-getting in its lissome melodies, pop-inflected instrumentation and minimalist use of repetition, sometimes leads to Nyman being categorized as a British Philip Glass. But more often he is nothing of the sort.

While the harmonic directness and rhythmic punchiness of minimalism is a signature of Nyman’s sensibility--and the source of much of his European popularity when realized with the virtuoso intrepidity of the Michael Nyman Band--so, too, is an uncompromising musical literacy, a fluency in styles from Vivaldi to Cage.

Nyman, who is 49, has not, in fact, had an ordinary composer’s career. After a traditional British musical education, which included study with the pioneering Baroque specialist Thurston Dart, Nyman, discouraged by the way 12-tone composers policed the British musical Establishment in the ‘60s, turned to music criticism. Attracted by the burgeoning experimental scene at the time, and often writing in the hippest British art journals, he was the first, in print, to label the music of Glass and Steve Reich as “minimal,” seeing a relationship between it and minimal art.

But, by 1976, Nyman had decided to put his music where his critical mouth was, so he quit writing about music and began writing it. “It was as though the Michael Nyman world arrived fully clothed,” he says, finding he could just as easily draw upon experimental processes, minimalism, pop or historical references.

In the soundtrack for the Greenaway film, “Drowning by Numbers,” for instance, Nyman says he took all the appoggiaturas in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola and “cut them up and stuck them together, like a William Burroughs cut up.” On another occasion he used the first several bars of an aria from “Don Giovanni” as the ostinato for a pop number. In his music for Greenaway’s “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” he Nymanized Purcell. “Every time I use a piece of classical music,” Nyman explains, “its purpose is different and it’s used in a different way. There’s no regular formula.”

For “The Piano,” Nyman has written a kind of imaginary 19th-Century music that is meant to represent the utterance of a mute pianist who reveals herself through her music. “The idea of creating a musical portrait,” Nyman says, “had to do with who Holly Hunter was as the actress and who she was playing in the film and how that particular character expressed herself.

“And since she was wild and eccentric and independent and fearsome and fearless, and she lived in Scotland, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t have taken little snippets of Chopin mazurkas, because she likes them, and put them together with tape loops and things like that.”

What is most unusual for Nyman, however, is not only the more traditionally lyrical nature of the music but that it is so closely woven into the character and fabric of the film. The success of Nyman’s Greenaway scores often had to do with the independence of the music, generally written before the film was made, and the strong-willed visual imagery of the film maker.

But drawing any generalizations about Nyman, a prolific composer, is dangerous. He’s written ballets, a wrenchingly serious song cycle on Paul Celan poems for the German chanteuse Ute Lemper (recently released, on London, in a video version directed by the German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff); a short chamber opera, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”; strings quartets and various other chamber and orchestra pieces, many recorded on Argo.

Still, Nyman has found it nearly impossible, until very recently, to break into the conservative British music Establishment, despite the large and enthusiastic audiences his concerts draw. Nor has his band ever been invited to perform in America.

But all that finally seems to be changing, thanks, in part, to “The Piano.” The Michael Nyman Band will be appearing at the Next Wave Festival at BAM next year, and he is looking for Los Angeles venue as well. He is writing a double concerto for the pianist Labeque sisters that is sure to get wide exposure. A piece for his band and orchestra was premiered by the Lille Philharmonic in September, commissioned to celebrate the new high-speed rail link between Paris and Lille.

And the phone, of course, is now ringing off the hook with more movie offers. He’s committed to another Campion project. But no more Greenaway. Those days are over.