Michael Laurence Nyman was born on 23 March 1944 in Stratford, east London, into a family of secular Jewish furriers who had come from Poland. He went to Sir George Monoux Grammar School in Walthamstow, then studied at King’s College London and at the Royal Academy of Music until 1967 with Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, concentrating on piano and seventeenth-century music, and won the Howard Carr Memorial Prize for composition in July 1964. A British Council bursary took him to Romania in 1965–66 to study folk song. He traces his own manner to playing “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” from Don Giovanni in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis, which he says settled the dynamic, articulation and texture of everything he has done since, and which became the basis of In Re Don Giovanni in 1977.

Writing criticism between 1968 and 1976, he was the first to apply the word minimalism to music, in a 1968 Spectator piece on Cornelius Cardew, and his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond became a standard account of Cage’s influence. He formed the Campiello Band in 1976 for a production of Goldoni’s Il Campiello — rebecs and shawms alongside saxophones, chosen to be as loud as possible without amplification — and it became the Michael Nyman Band, for which much of his music is written. Eleven scores for Peter Greenaway, drawing openly on Purcell, Biber, Mozart and Dowland, and the soundtrack to Jane Campion’s The Piano, which sold in the millions, made his name outside the concert hall; he has also written a series of operas, six concertos and five string quartets, and says he prefers opera to any other form.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nyman
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q313639