jwilzewske: Michael Nyman: Successful Minimalist, Successful Film Composer

T here’s always a question of duration; there’s a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want—you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else’s work is motivating you.”
— Michael Nyman

CMT: Yesterday I saw the 2006 Michael Winterbottom – Steve Coogan film, ‘Tristram Shandy,’ on DVD. Nice Michael Nyman soundtrack, including a re-do of the adaptation of Handel’s Sarabande in D minor—the one that he did for the 1982 Peter Greenaway film, ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract.’

DSM: Remind me—a sarabande is a slow dance that typically has a hemiola meter, right? Three in two? A hemiola is a metrical pattern in which two bars in triple time (3/2 or 3/4 or 3/8, for example) are articulated as if they were three bars in duple time (2/2 or 2/4 or 2/8). ‘Hemiola’ derives from the Greek ‘hemiolios’, meaning “one and a half”—am I remembering that correctly?

CMT: Yes. And Handel’s original Sarabande in D minor illustrates interplay between at least five rhythmic levels: the natural poetic meter, the imposed poetic meter, the expected meter of the dance, the harmonic rhythm of the music and the ternary rhythm. Nyman adapts this interplay to create an edgy, intense, off-balance pulse.

DSM: It’s a little hard for us today to think of dancing with such resolute sadness. The traditional ‘saudades’ of Portugal; some Spanish tango—so there are a few modern forms, I suppose, that have poetic meter, dance meter, and harmonic rhythms similar to a sarabande. . . But I suppose that the ritualized gestures of the sarabande as a dance—the partners continue in their stylized way governed by the music until the music concludes, with no escape once it’s begun—I suppose this dance idiom serves to lend a fatalistic nuance to what Nyman is doing. In other words, I suppose Nyman chose this sarabande form so as to emphasize the constraints that the characters have. Tristram Shandy, after all, is concerned with the ‘thrownness’ and profound uncontrollability of life—we humans are, in contravention of all wishes we might have to be masters of our destiny, constrained by circumstances and chance occurrences.

CMT: Michael Nyman followed a traditional music education at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College London. Renouncing Classical Music traditions, he spent some time collecting examples of Romanian folk music before working as a musicologist and critic. His famous book ‘Experimental Music, Cage and beyond’ was mainly about minimalism and exploring the relationship between composer, performer and audience, the relationship between sound and silence, and music-as-theatre.

DSM: Nyman’s own minimalist compositions rely on simple patterns and repeated figures, with progressive or cyclical variations as vessels for his meaning. Often, the progressions are hypnotic in the way that dance music is routinely hypnotic. For more than 25 years Nyman has nurtured a strong relationship with film director Peter Greenaway. The music for these Peter Greenaway films was played by the Nyman Band, whose distinctive sound hints at jazz and features saxophones. But he takes short phrases and chord sequences mostly from the Baroque and Classical eras. Nyman frequently borrows motives from composers such as Handel, Purcell, Mozart and Brahms. These are used as passacaglia-like foundations for variations anchored with a ‘ground’. One characteristic of Nyman's music from this time is that it simply stops abruptly when the last variation finishes—he almost never recapitulates with a Coda. Very dramatic—what this does in the context of a film! I wonder why more chamber music composers don’t pitch the art flick producers and directors . . .

CMT: Though Nyman scored lots of soundtracks for Greenaway, it was for director Jane Campion that Nyman’s best known work was composed. The soundtrack to ‘The Piano’ illustrates his minimalism. Curiously, Michael Nyman has been known to introduce himself to a French audience as ‘The English Yann Tiersen.’

DSM: The 2 + 1 division of the measure in the triple meters is maybe more common, more thematic in later repertoires than it is in Baroque music. We may have even come to hear it as more natural than the division into 1 + 2. The division into 1 + 2, by contrast, is a kind of characteristically Baroque rhythmic device exemplified in the sarabande, the minuet, and other genres that are geared to this accented second beat.

CMT: Counterstress or local emphasis on the second beat (representing not displacement but rather the accent scheme of an established genre) is a feature of most of Handel’s sarabandes, chaconnes, and minuets. And it’s prominent, too, in his other dance pieces. Such emphasis, which doesn’t detract from the metrical force of the downbeat, rarely causes backbeat displacement. It usually accrues to the second beat through a durational accent or through a melodic, textural, or registral intensification of the type that William Rothstein calls counterstress. Counterstress defines these dance forms, especially when the rhythms of the piece suggest that the genre in question is enclosed within the confines of another genre. But a counterstress that falls on the second beat and competes with the adjacent downbeat can occur in any composition. Its prevalence in dances is probably the reason why it appears in the triple meters so often. Its ubiquity in imitative textures—during the preparation and the resolution of suspensions, and at points of imitation—accounts for its inverse prevalence in the duple meters.

DSM: In addressing the performance of sarabandes, Donald Waxman says that, historically, sarabandes were lusty dances complete with castanets and tambourines, but that by the 18th-century, sarabandes had evolved into sober, un-lusty things. In describing the sarabande, he states: “Danced to a sustained but not too slow pulse in three, the sarabande is unusual for a dance in triple time because of its frequent stresses on the second beat. These stresses on beat two, somewhat the equivalent of a double downbeat, can be very repetitive, or they can alternate over two or four bars, as often occurs in the Bach sarabandes.”

CMT: Willner identifies several categories of Handelian hemiolas—cadential, expansion, contraction, and overlapping hemiolas. He says that the hemiola courts a level of tension or uncertainty in that the hemiola may not be the same in the outer voices: the bass may not necessarily support the hemiola in the upper voice, and the upper voice may not corroborate the hemiola in the bass. Especially in such cases, the tension accrues through a series of stresses—rhythmic accents that are due to melodic, textural, harmonic, or registral intensification.

DSM: Because the overlapping hemiolas span several bars, the temporary metrical uncertainty they portray in the middle can create big disturbances in the rhythmic flux of the piece. To foster a compositional and rhetorical milieu in which such disturbance will achieve its intended effect without going in the ditch, Handel prepares the onset of his hemiolas in some way during the preceding passages and then only gradually allows them to dissipate in the phrase or phrases that follow. By the time their peregrinations are finished, their very presence in the piece will have promoted additional rhythmic space, and this might have in turn become the compositional essence of the piece.

CMT: Nyman’s awkwardness and abruptness are not unlike the difficulties Baroque composers faced when, in the course of short pieces, they felt need to resolve complex issues they had raised moments earlier but did not quite have the needed durational space in which to work out the resolution. It’s much like the problem of microfiction—how do you write a short story in 250 words?

DSM: And Handel’s handling of the Sarabande’s durational space is typical of the improvizational nature of Baroque style. It gives a degree of compositional freedom, wouldn’t you say?

CMT: I do worry, though, that Nyman is co-opting the sarabande, taking it far out of context. The sarabande is offered as a homily, yet when we watch the films that have these pieces as part of the soundtracks we have no idea what this genre designation means to the homiletical way in which the music is heard or played in the context of the films. Is it right to simply unleash the thing to be heard empirically, without intertextual reference even to other works that we understand as belonging to the genre of Baroque dance. Isn’t this a very risky thing to do? A big risk of being misunderstood, or not understood at all?

DSM: Since most acts of listening include categorization of the music being heard and categorization plays an important role in listening strategies, the implications of the musical surface must be shaped, to a large degree, by intertextual reference. What does the viewer-listener who has no intertextual references or familiarity with Baroque dances make of this passage’s primary metrical form?

CMT: I prefer Hatten’s ‘stylistic level’ to refer to surface issues, and his ‘strategic level’ to denote large-scale matters, such as the rhetorical ordering of topical groups and sections. ‘Topics’ in Handel’s D-minor Sarabande include the characteristic pairs of repeated notes on the first and second beats of many measures, the preponderance of durational accents on many second beats, the use of characteristic chordal and intervallic textures in thematic areas, and the underlying progressions and division into eight-bar phrases and four-bar subphrases. In their own genre, topical passages are ‘unmarked’ since they’re familiar to the listener who has heard other instances of the genre. But when the same topical passages make guest appearances in other genres, as they do here in film soundtracks, they take on a ‘marked’ quality. In Handel’s D-minor Sarabande, topical passages appear only on their own turf and remain unmarked until Nyman’s Sarabande’s narrative scheme transforms them into marked passages.

DSM: It’s of course by no means certain that the listener’s conception of the screenplay’s plot will coincide with the composer’s or the analyst’s, or with the performers’ or director’s, for that matter. The listener, who possesses few of the analyst’s tools or experience, makes sense of it in an ad hoc way. But even if in the first few bars of Handel's D-minor Sarabande virtually every detail of its rhythm, melody, and harmony is a trope that can be found in other examples of this same genre, and even if many listeners may not be able to recall whether a ‘reference’ at, say, m. 25, is to a previous point in the same piece or to a similar passage in another one, I think that both analyst and listener will approach such passages as singular moments in a work that tells a unique story. Their interpretations will depend less on their ability to recognize the intertextual roots of such passages as they will depend on their capacity to interpret the unique use to which these roots are put in relation to what they have just heard and seen. For the listener as well as the analyst, apprehending Handel’s D-minor Sarabande—or Nyman’s variations on it—is therefore an active, creative experience. It doesn’t depend on an extensive familiarity with Baroque chamber music as such. And, yes, maybe chamber music would be more socially popular than it current ly is, if composers (or organizations such as CMA) overtly marketed to the film industry.

jwilzewske

Monday, January 22, 2007

Michael Nyman: Successful Minimalist, Successful Film Composer

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