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Floraleda Sacchi is an Italian harpist, writer, and musicologist. A pupil of Lisetta Rossi, Alice Giles, Judy Loman, and Alice Chalifoux, Sacchi studied in Italy, the United States, and Canada. She gave over 600 concerts internationally between 1998 and 2012, and she participated in many competitions and festivals. She plays a variety of instruments, including the pedal harp, the Celtic harp, the electric harp, and historical harps, and she has performed and written about harp music of the 18th and 19th centuries, rediscovering works by Sophia Giustina Corri-Dussek, Elias Parish Alvars, and Alphonse Hasselmans. Sacchi has created dramatic presentations that combine actors and musicians, such as her Mystery Tales for actor, harp, and string quartet; Travel to the Moon for actor, harp, and planetarium, which has been performed at the Milan Planetarium; and Donna non rieducabile, performed with Ottavia Piccolo's narration. Sacchi is the artistic director of the Lake Como Festival. She has recorded for Tactus, Amadeus Arte, and Decca.

Lou Harrison was one of the most inventive and individual of American composers. His music is noted for its pervasive integration of Native American and Asian musical influences and its emphasis on melody and rhythm, often avoiding harmony altogether.

His family moved from Oregon when he was nine, and continued to move frequently around the San Francisco Bay area. The very diverse musical atmosphere of San Francisco was the primary formative force in his life. He could hear Cantonese opera; Gregorian chant; Spanish, Mexican, and Native-American music; and jazz and classical music. The San Francisco Public Library, with its strong music department, enabled him to take armloads of music home to study. He studied jazz piano, Gregorian chant, and conducting while in high school. He took Henry Cowell's course on "Music of the World's Peoples," further studying counterpoint and composition with Cowell.

He and John Cage both wrote percussion-dominated music and found new percussion instruments in automobile junkyards and import shops; one of their discoveries was the wonderful pitched ringing sound produced by brake drums. Harrison eventually went to the University of California at Los Angeles to work with its dance department. While there, he was a composition pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. Harrison had already developed a love of Renaissance and earlier music. He adopted the old dance form "estampie," a word he translates as "stampede" for his own stamping, highly rhythmic fast movements.

In 1943, he moved to New York where he worked as a musician and writer. It was the unhappiest period of his life; he did not like the place, and found it difficult to make a living, although he did write some 300 music reviews for the Herald Tribune from 1944 to 1947. He developed a stomach ulcer and finally had a nervous breakdown. During this period, he made the acquaintance of Charles Ives and assisted the aged composer by editing and preparing for performance Ives' Third Symphony, which Harrison conducted at its premiere. Ives assisted Harrison financially when needed and, when the Third Symphony won the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Ives gave Harrison half the money.

The 1947 nervous breakdown resulted in Harrison deciding to change his compositional style. He began to imitate the sounds of gamelan orchestra, which he had first heard at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. He studied Harry Partch's theoretical book Genesis of a Music (a gift from Virgil Thomson) and was convinced to adopt various forms of just-intonation rather than the standard 12-note scale. (He says he wishes musicians were numerically trained, so that he could say, for instance, "Cellos, you gave me a 10/9 there; please give me a 9/8 instead.")

Harrison subsequently resumed his high productivity, returned to the West coast in 1951 to settle for life in Aptos, California and continued to write music sounding primarily "Pan-Pacific" in style, often for unusual combinations of instruments. He first visited Asia in 1961 at a world music symposium, afterward, he became interested in establishing gamelan orchestras in North America, and devised an "American gamelan" made by his partner William Colvig from readily obtainable materials. He went on to write hundreds of compositions, and his works are often recorded. Harrison developed a system of musical organization based around melodic shapes he calls "melodicles" and analogous rhythmic patterns ("rhythmicals") and durations ("icti controls"). Lou Harrison died in 2003 en route to an Ohio festival dedicated to performances of his works.

The most influential and controversial American experimental composer of the 20th century, John Cage was the father of indeterminism, a Zen-inspired aesthetic which expelled all notions of choice from the creative process. Rejecting the most deeply held compositional principles of the past -- logical consequence, vertical sensitivity, and tonality among them -- Cage created a groundbreaking alternative to the serialist method, deconstructing traditions established hundreds and even thousands of years earlier; the end result was a radical new artistic approach which impacted all of the music composed in its wake, forever altering not only the ways in which sounds are created but also how they're absorbed by audiences. Indeed, it's often been suggested that he did to music what Karl Marx did to government -- he leveled it.

Cage was born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, the son of an inventor who posited an explanation of the cosmos called the "Electrostatic Field Theory." Later attending Pomona College, he exited prior to graduation to travel across Europe during the early '30s; upon returning to the U.S., he studied in New York with Henry Cowell, finally traveling back to the West Coast in 1934 to study under Arnold Schoenberg. Around this time Cage published his earliest compositions, a series of Varèse-inspired works written in a rigorous atonal system of his own device. Relocating to Seattle in 1937 to become a dance accompanist, a year later he founded a percussion ensemble, composing the seminal polyrhythms piece First Construction (In Metal) in 1939.

During the late 1930s, Cage also began experimenting with musique concrète, composing the landmark Imaginary Landscape No. 1, which employed variable-speed phonographs and frequency tone recordings alongside muted piano and a large Chinese cymbal. He also invented the "prepared piano," in which he placed a variety of household objects between the strings of a grand piano to create sounds suggesting a one-man percussion orchestra. It was at this time that Cage fell under the sway of Eastern philosophies, the influence of Zen Buddhism informing the random compositional techniques of his later work; obsessed with removing forethought and choice from the creative model, he set out to make music in line with the principles of the I Ching, predictable only by its very unpredictability.

Cage's work of the 1940s took a variety of shapes: where 1941's Imaginary Landscape No. 2 was a score for percussion which included a giant metal coil amplified by a phonograph cartridge, 1942's Williams Mix was a montage of over 500 prerecorded sounds, and 1944's The Perilous Night was an emotional piece written for a heavily muted prepared piano. The latter was composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, for which Cage served as musical director from 1943 onward; his collaborations with Cunningham revolutionized modern dance composition and choreography, with the indeterminacy concept extending into these works as well. His most widely recorded work, the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, appeared in 1948. By the end of the decade Cage's innovations were widely recognized, and in 1949 he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cage's most visionary work, however, was still to come. In 1951, he completed Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which limited its sound sources to only a dozen radios, with the end result dependent entirely on the broadcast material at the time of performance. That same year, he collaborated with a group of performers and engineers to mount the Music on Magnetic Tape project In 1952, pianist and longtime associate David Tudor premiered Cage's 4'33", known colloquially as Silence (and officially as 4'33"), the composer's most notorious work, the performer sits at his instrument but plays nothing; the environmental sounds are instead produced by a typically uncomfortable audience. Concurrently, he delved into theatrical performance (a 1952 performance at Black Mountain College widely regarded as the first "happening") and electronics (Imaginary Landscape No. 5, composed for randomly mixed recordings).

In the wake of 1958's watershed Concert for Piano and Orchestra -- a virtual catalog of indeterminate notations -- Cage continued to immerse himself in electronics as the years went by, most famously in works like 1960's Cartridge Music, for which he amplified small household sounds for live performance, as well as 1969's HPSCHD, which combined harpsichord, tapes, and the like. He also turned to writing, publishing his first book, Silence, in 1961, additionally teaching and lecturing across the globe. Elected to the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, he also received an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institutes of the Arts in 1986. Cage died in New York on August 12, 1992. ~ Jason Ankeny

Of all the early twentieth century American musical revolutionaries, perhaps composer Henry Cowell wielded the most vivid and far-reaching influence. Born in 1897 to a rural California family, Cowell began to study the violin at age five, though his parents' hopes of creating a prodigy on the instrument remained unfulfilled when the lessons had to be stopped on account of the boy's poor health. After his parents' divorce in 1903, Cowell spent several years traveling around the country visiting relatives with his mother. It was during one such journey in 1908 that he began to write his own music, his first known effort at composition being an unfinished setting of Longfellow's Golden Legend.

Until he began musical studies with Charles Seeger at the University of California at Berkeley in 1914, Cowell remained a basically self-taught musician, as well as a young man who had never spent so much as a day in school in his life. Seeger was impressed by the young Cowell's output -- over 100 compositions of varying quality by 1914 -- but was much more interested in the young composer's hyper-creative, open-minded musical personality. Free of the often confining attitudes which govern formal musical education, Cowell had come to view any sound as musical substance with which he could work, and his early music owes more to the influence of birdsong, machine noises and folk music than it does to any knowledge of earlier masterworks. In The Tides of Manaunaun, Cowell asks the pianist to use his or her fist, palm, and forearm on the keys of the instrument's bass register to evoke massive tidal waves, an early example of what he called the tone cluster. Cowell used this and similar techniques in many later works, which proved to be highly influential for many of the "sound mass" composers of later decades, including Penderecki, Ligeti, and numerous electronic composers.

However, Seeger felt that without structure and guidelines Cowell would remain an unskilled, if impressively inventive, musician, and he encouraged the young composer to make a rigorous study of traditional harmony and counterpoint. In 1919, at Seeger's suggestion, Cowell finished a systematic treatise on his own music entitled New Musical Resources, in which he discusses new musical techniques, aesthetic directions, and possible alterations to the accepted system of musical notation. Concert appearances throughout North America and Europe during the 1920s earned Cowell countless friends and enemies throughout the musical establishment. Although he had earned the respect of such luminaries as Bartók and Schoenberg, his concerts frequently caused audience riots and invoked the wrath of critics who wondered if Cowell's headstrong independence disguised a lack of true musical craftsmanship. In the Aeolian Harp (1923), for piano, Cowell instructs the pianist to play "inside" the piano by sweeping, scraping, strumming, and muting the strings. The Banshee (1925) applies indeterminacy and graphic notation with instructions for the pianist to play exclusively inside the piano while an assistant holds down the damper pedal. Playing techniques include scraping the strings with a fingernail, and pizzicato effects, all performed in the lowest registers of the instrument, yielding resonant and primarily non-pitched waves of sound.

Later music, such as the Amerind Suite for piano (1939) and the 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1964) incorporate generous helpings of indeterminacy, though from the 1930s onward, Cowell's compositional language grew increasingly tonal and rhythmically simplified. Cowell died after several years of serious illness.

As one of postmodern music's most celebrated and high-profile composers, Philip Glass' myriad orchestral works, operas, film scores, and dance pieces proved essential to the development of ambient and new age sounds, and his fusions of Western and world musics were among the earliest and most successful global experiments of their kind. Tirelessly exploring and pushing boundaries since the early '60s, Glass produced multiple breakthrough works that helped define entire musical movements, with standouts including 1976's durational opera Einstein on the Beach, 1982's collection of more accessible neo-classical pieces Glassworks, and stellar film scores perfecting the mood for The Thin Blue Line, Kundun, The Hours, and many, many more.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 1937, Glass took up the flute at the age of eight; at 15, he was accepted to the University of Chicago, ostensibly majoring in philosophy but spending most of his waking hours on the piano. He spent four years at Juilliard after graduation, followed in 1963 by a two-year period in Paris under the tutelage of the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Glass' admitted artistic breakthrough came while working with Ravi Shankar on transcribing Indian music; the experience inspired him to begin structuring music by rhythmic phrases instead of by notation, forcing him to reject the 12-tone idiom of purist classical composition as well as traditional elements including harmony, melody, and tempo.

Glass' growing fascination with non-Western musics inspired him to hitchhike across North Africa and India, finally returning to New York in 1967. There he began to develop his distinctively minimalist compositional style, his music consisting of hypnotically repetitious circular rhythms. While Glass quickly staked out territory in the blooming downtown art community, his work met with great resistance from the classical establishment, and to survive he was forced to work as a plumber and, later, as a cab driver. In the early '70s, he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a seven-piece group composed of woodwinds, a variety of keyboards, and amplified voices; their music found its initial home in art galleries but later moved into underground rock clubs, including the famed Max's Kansas City. After receiving initial refusals to publish his music, Glass formed his own imprint, Chatham Square Productions, in 1971; a year later, he self-released his first recording, Music with Changing Parts. Subsequent efforts like 1973's Music in Similar Motion/Music in Fifths earned significant fame overseas, and in 1974 he signed to Virgin U.K.

Glass rose to international fame with his 1976 "portrait opera" Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with scenarist Robert Wilson. An early masterpiece close to five hours in length, it toured Europe and was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House; while it marked Glass' return to classical Western harmonic elements, its dramatic rhythmic and melodic shifts remained the work's most startling feature. At much the same time, he was attracting significant attention from mainstream audiences as a result of the album North Star, a collection of shorter pieces that he performed in rock venues and even at Carnegie Hall. In the years to follow, Glass focused primarily on theatrical projects, and in 1980 he presented Satyagraha, an operatic portrayal of the life of Gandhi complete with a Sanskrit libretto inspired by The Bhagavad Gita. Similar in theme and scope was 1984's Akhnaten, which examined the myth of the Egyptian pharaoh. In 1983, Glass made the first of many forays into film composition with the score to the Godfrey Reggio cult hit Koyaanisqatsi; a sequel, Powaqqatsi, followed five years later.

While remaining best known for his theatrical productions, Glass also enjoyed a successful career as a recording artist. In 1981, he signed an exclusive composer's contract with the CBS Masterworks label, the first such contract offered to an artist since Aaron Copland; a year later, he issued Glassworks, a highly successful instrumental collection of orchestral and ensemble performances. In 1983, he released The Photographer, including a track with lyrics by David Byrne; that same year, Glass teamed with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek for Carmina Burana. Released in 1986, Songs from Liquid Days featured lyrics from luminaries including Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, and Suzanne Vega, and became Glass' best-selling effort to date.

By this time, he was far and away the avant-garde's best-known composer, thanks also to his music for the 1984 Olympic Games and works like The Juniper Tree, an opera based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In 1992, Glass was even commissioned to write The Voyage for the Met in honor of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas -- clear confirmation of his acceptance by the classical establishment. In 1997, he scored the Martin Scorsese masterpiece Kundun, and in coming years would become increasingly more involved with film, composing a new score for the 1931 Dracula film as well as original scores for films like Music from The Hours (2002), Neverwas (2005), The Illusionist (2006), No Reservations (2007), and many more. During the 2000s, Glass also prolifically composed for the concert hall, writing a series of concerti for various instruments, a handful of symphonies (No. 6: Plutonian Ode, No. 7: Toltec), several operas (Galileo Galilei, The Perfect American), songs, poems, and countless other projects.

Theatrical works like Glass' 2009 score for Euripides' The Bacchae and the opera Kepler led into the next decade, which saw him continue to compose at seemingly tireless rate. His collaborations have branched out into various popular musical genres including rock musicians (David Bowie, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen) electronic and ambient artists (Aphex Twin, Brian Eno), and mainstream, big-budget cinema, as on his 2015 soundtrack collaboration with composer Marco Beltrami for Marvel's Fantastic Four film. 2015 also saw the publication of his memoir, Words Without Music. In 2017, Glass supplied the score to Jane, a documentary about famed primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall. Two years after he debuted Symphony No. 12, inspired by David Bowie's 1979 album Lodger. Preceded by 1992's Symphony No. 1 (Low) and 1996's Symphony No. 4 (Heroes), it completed Glass' cycle of symphonies based on Bowie's late-'70s Berlin trilogy.

After scoring Bernard Rose's film Samurai Marathon 1855 and a theatrical production of King Lear, Glass began the 2020s with several major works. Among the most high profile were the 2021 opera Circus Days and Nights, the Alice ballet for orchestra his 13th symphony, both of which premiered in 2022. A year later he collaborated with fellow composer Paul Leonard-Morgan on the score for the John le Carre documentary The Pigeon Tunnel. ~ Jason Ankeny & Timothy Monger

Arvo Pärt is a contemporary Estonian composer of choral, chamber, and orchestral music, and the inventor of the compositional technique known as Tintinnabula. He faced opposition early in his career for both his faith and his exploration of modernist compositional concepts, but became one of the most performed composers during his lifetime. He was born in 1935 in Paide, Estonia and he was an only child. When he was three years old, he moved with his mother to Rakvere, where he attended the Rakvere Music School from 1945 to 1953. It was at this time that he studied with Ille Martin and he composed his first works, which were unfortunately lost. After he graduated in 1954, he enrolled at the Tallinn Music School but was called into service with the Soviet Army. He played the oboe, percussion, and piano in the military band, but he was discharged in the fall of 1956 because of poor health, and he resumed his education. Upon his return, he received instruction from Veljo Tormis, followed by studies with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory from 1957 to 1963. He developed long-lasting friendships with both instructors, and in 1963 he dedicated his Symphony No. 1 to Eller. Beginning around 1958, Pärt supported himself by composing theatrical works for the Estonian State Puppet Theater and scores for films and documentaries, and he worked as a recording engineer for Estonian Radio until 1967. He became interested in composers from the Renaissance such as Machaut, Desprez, and Obrecht, and these influences can be heard in Credo from 1968 and Symphony No. 3 from 1971. Credo also contained several other compositional concepts like serialized rhythm, tone clusters, and 12-tone technique. This caused an outrage among the nationalist Soviet Composers’ Union, which viewed his music as the hostile acceptance and integration of foreign (Western) influence. Additionally, the sacred theme of Christianity upset the anti-religious Soviet-Estonian government and the work was banned from performance for many years. In the early '70s he became dissatisfied with his methods for composition, and he took some time to reflect and redefine himself as a composer. He returned to composing in 1976 and created the concept of tintinnabula, which remains a key component to his style as a composer. In 1977 he continued developing tintinnabula, and he composed some of his most performed works, including Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Fratres, and Tabula rasa. After his absurdly ironic acceptance speech at the 11th Congress of the Estonian SSR Composers’ Union in 1979, he was dismissed from the organization, and Estonian authorities suggested that he leave the country. He moved with his family to Vienna in 1980 and they settled in West Berlin in 1981. Over the next ten years, he established partnerships with ECM Records and the publisher Universal Edition, and he composed several large-scale works including Stabat Mater and Te Deum. He also began important collaborations with The Hilliard Ensemble and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, which led to many recordings including the albums Arbos, Passio, and Te Deum. Pärt’s membership to the Estonian Composers’ Union was reinstated in 2005, and in 2007 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir won a Grammy award for the album Arvo Pärt: Da Pacem. Pärt moved back to Estonia in 2010, and he established the Arvo Pärt Centre, which manages and curates his personal archive and offers educational programs. The 2012 release Arvo Pärt: Adam’s Lament conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance in 2014. Many artists have recorded his music in the 2020s including Arabella Steinbacher, Tomasz Wabnic and the Morphing Chamber Orchestra, and Pedro Piquero on the 2023 release Pärt: Lamentate. ~ RJ Lambert

György Ligeti was one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century. He stood with Boulez, Berio, Stockhausen, and Cage as one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time. His early works show the influence of Bartók and Kodály, and like them, he studied folk music and made transcriptions from folk material. In Apparitions (1958-1959) and Atmosphères (1961), he developed a style forged from chromatic cluster chords that are devoid of conventional melody, pitch and rhythm, but instead grow into timbres and textures that yield new sonic possibilities. The composer referred to this method as "micropolyphony." In Aventures (1962), Ligeti devised a vocal technique in which the singers are required to make a full range of vocalizations, cries and nonsense noises to fashion a kind of imaginary, non-specific drama, but with rather specifically expressed emotions. Ligeti was almost alone among progressive composers from the latter twentieth century who have written popular and widely performed music.

Ligeti was born on May 28, 1923, in the Transylvanian town of Dicsöszentmárton, Romania and grew up in Kolozsvar, Klausenburg. At the age of 14, he began taking piano lessons and soon wrote his first composition, a waltz.

Because he was a Jew living under the Nazi-puppet regime in Hungary, Ligeti was forbidden university study and thus enrolled in the Kolozsvar Conservatory in 1941, and began studies with Ferenc Farkas, a Respighi pupil. Later, in Budapest, he also studied with pianist-composer Pál Kadosa.

In January 1944, Ligeti was arrested and sent to a labor camp where he remained imprisoned until 1945. Other family members were sent to Auschwitz, where only his mother survived. Ligeti graduated from the Budapest Academy of Music in 1949 and began an extended period of study of folk music.

In the years of 1950-1956, he served as a professor at the Budapest Academy. His music was largely unadventurous during this period, owing to restrictions by the Hungarian Communist regime. Ligeti and his wife fled their homeland during the Revolution in 1956, settling in Vienna. Ligeti began studying and composing at the Cologne-based Electronic Music Studio from 1957 to 1959, producing the influential Artikulation (1958), one of his first electronic works.

Other important progressive works followed, such as the orchestral composition, Apparitions (1958-1959) and Atmosphères (1961). In 1959, Ligeti began serving as visiting professor at the Academy of Music in Stockholm and also started teaching courses at Darmstadt.

His choral work Requiem (1963-1965) was another success, as were Ramifications (1968-1969), for string orchestra or 12 solo strings, and Clocks and Clouds (1972-1973). In 1972, Ligeti became Composer in Residence at Stanford University and the following year took on a professorship at the Hamburg Academy of Music. Ligeti composed his opera Le Grand Macabre in the period 1975-1977, but revised it in the 1990s, with the final version completed in 1997. It has become one of his most popular large works.

In 1982, the composer's mother died. That same year saw a return of Ligeti's health after a period of five years' sickness. In the 1980s the composer forswore further composition in the realm of electronic music. Ligeti retired from his post as professor of composition at the Hamburg Music Academy in 1989. In the 1990s, he spent much time on the aforementioned second version of Le Grand Macabre.

Ligeti received his share of awards and prizes, including the 1986 Grawemeyer Prize and the 1996 Music Prize of the International Music Council.

Composer and pianist Michael Nyman is not only lauded for his own modular, repetition-based approach to music, he introduced the term "minimal music" -- a precursor to "minimalism" -- through his work as a critic in the 1960s. More recognized by the broader public for his film scores, he began a lasting partnership with director Peter Greenaway in the late '70s that included such arthouse releases as 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and 1991's Prospero's Books. It was his BAFTA-nominated score for Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano that became his best-known work, however; his 1994 expansion, The Piano Concerto, reached the Top Ten of the Billboard Traditional Classical Albums chart. In the meantime, he ventured into forms including opera, ballet, and varied chamber music. His many works inspired by literature range from art songs set to the words of Shakespeare and Rimbaud to 2007's 8 Lust Songs, featuring the erotic poetry of Pietro Aretino. Across his output, Nyman's musical signatures include not only his use of propulsive repetition but also a palette of idiosyncratic instrumental touches -- thumping keyboards, "rude" bass clarinets and baritone saxophones, and extreme high and low octave doublings. In 2008, he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II. Still premiering compositions and scoring for the screen throughout the next decade, his long-running ensemble the Michael Nyman Band launched a 40th anniversary tour in 2018.

Born Michael Laurence Nyman in Stratford, East London, on March 23, 1944, Nyman attended the Royal Academy of Music from 1961 to 1964, studying with, among others, Alan Bush and Geraint Jones. During his three years as a Ph.D. student at King's College under Thurston Dart (a musicologist specializing in the English Baroque), he spent a year as an exchange student, studying the folk music of Romania. Under Dart's tutelage, Nyman was introduced to 16th and 17th century English rounds and canons, their repetitive, contrapuntal lines highly influencing his own later work. Dart also encouraged his trip to Romania. Upon graduating in 1967, Nyman found himself disconnected from both the pop music of the times and the school of modern composition heralded by Stockhausen. As a result, from 1964 to 1976, he worked as a music critic, writing for publications including The Listener, New Statesman, and The Spectator. In a 1968 review of British composer Cornelius Cardew, he coined the term "minimal" as a means of musical description.

During this same period, Nyman did continue performing, appearing with artists ranging from the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia to Steve Reich and the Flying Lizards. In 1974, he wrote the influential book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, an exploration of the influence of John Cage on a generation of composers and performers. Perhaps its most profound impact was on Nyman himself, who through writing the book seemed to discover his own muse. In 1976, he accepted an invitation from Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, to arrange a number of 18th century Venetian popular songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. Nyman's arrangements consisted of medieval instruments -- rebecs, sackbuts and shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and the like -- designed for maximum loudness to produce a distinctive instrumental color. When the production ended, he began composing original music merely to keep the same group of musicians together. Originally an acoustic unit, when rechristened the Michael Nyman Band in the early '80s, this type of amplification became essential to their aesthetic.

Having already collaborated with the director on a number of short films and 1980's The Falls, Nyman's first major success came in 1982 with the score to the Greenaway film The Draughtsman's Contract. His subsequent collaborations with Greenaway on pictures including 1988's Drowning by Numbers, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and 1991's Prospero's Books, became among his most high-profile works, with their notoriety coming at the risk of overshadowing his forays into opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores.

While Mozart was a central influence in much of Nyman's work (1976's In Re Don Giovanni, 1983's I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump), Schumann was the major inspiration behind his acclaimed 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Later, 1988's String Quartet No. 2, a piece commissioned for the Indian dancer and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, was shaded by Bartók. In 1990, Nyman composed Six Celan Songs, a work based on the poems of Paul Celan, for the German cabaret singer Ute Lemper. The two had worked together previously on his score for Prospero's Books. Nyman's most emotional compositions to that point, the songs served as the clear impetus for his score to Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano. Like so many of his compositions, he obsessively reworked the music to The Piano time and time again, its haunting melodies reappearing arranged for standard piano concerto (The Piano Concerto), for two pianos, for chamber ensemble, for soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found), and for soprano and string quartet (The Piano Sings). While 1992's The Upside-Down Violin reflected Nyman's continuing fascination with traditional regional folk music, 1993's MGV, or Musique a Grande Vitesse, returned to the dynamic sounds of the Michael Nyman Band. His other major works from this period include 1993's Yamamoto Perpetuo (a composition for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu), 1994's solo harpsichord work Tango for Tim, and 1995's String Quartet No. 4, which was based on Yamamoto Perpetuo. Meanwhile still composing for film, he scored 1995's Carrington and 1997's Gattaca as well as the 1999 Michael Winterbottom film Wonderland.

The year 2000 saw the premiere of Nyman's opera Facing Goya. Featuring a libretto by Victoria Hardie, it was an expansion of their 1987 one-act opera Vital Statistics. He then composed a pair of operas with playwright Michael Hastings: 2003's Man and Boy: Dada and 2005's Love Counts. Recorded shortly after the work's premiere, the album 8 Lust Songs: I Sonetti Lussuriosi was released on Nyman's own MN Records in 2008, the same year he was awarded the CBE for his services to music.

Nyman's 2009 opera, Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, was written in collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, and his 2011 opera, Prologue to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, featured librettist Vera Pavlova. Throughout the decade, in addition to scoring various films including several documentaries, Nyman composed a song cycle, piano quintet, and Trumpet & String Quartet (2013), among various other projects. In 2015, as part of the Odessa International Film Festival, he provided live accompaniment to the silent film Man with a Movie Camera on the famed Potemkin Stairs. The Michael Nyman Band celebrated their 40th anniversary with a tour in 2018. A more commercial film than he had done of late, 2020's Maigret et la Jeune Morte, featured Nyman's music alongside Gérard Depardieu's turn as the famous French detective. ~ Jason Ankeny & Marcy Donelson