Michael Nyman (b. 1944)
The Piano Concerto; Where the Bee Dances

When Michael Nyman published his study Experimental Music: John Cage and Beyond (1974), he could hardly have foreseen his own contribution to that "beyond". Rejecting the orthodoxies of British modernism, Nyman had abandoned composition in 1964, working instead as a musicologist, editing Purcell and Handel, and collecting folk-music in Romania. Later he became a music critic, in which capacity he was the first to apply the word "minimalism" to music, in a 1968 review for The Spectator of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Digest.

That same year, a chance encounter with a BBC broadcast of Steve Reich's Come Out opened Nyman's ears to further possibilities. A route back to composition was emerging. He wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's 1969 "dramatic pastoral" Down by the Greenwood Side. In 1977, Birtwistle, by no