Volume 1 (2006)
ISSN 1751-7788
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The Case Against Nyman Revisited: ‘Affirmative’ and ‘Critical’ Evidence in Michael Nyman’s Appropriation of Mozart.

Carlo Cenciarelli
King’s College London

My lord, the case against the defendant, Michael Lawrence Nyman, is, in a nutshell, that he has brazenly plagiarised Mozart, and has committed what in effect is a blatant intellectual theft.
Joseph Haydn’s marble bust.[1]

What I do looks deeply into Mozart’s musical language and makes discoveries about it. Ok the music is remodelled, I impose a postmodern aesthetic on it, but I do treat it with respect. There’s a vein of educationalism in me.
Michael Nyman.[2]

In Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), part of a BBC project aimed to provide an opportunity ‘for six contemporary composers and filmmakers to produce their own homage to Mozart’ in the bicentenary of his death, Michael Nyman decided to end his personal tribute to the master by staging a trial in which he himself would be accused of plagiarism of Mozart’s music. Amadeus (Ute Lemper), shaking with fever in his deathbed, has a series of confused dreams. One moment he is singing to his father the list of his latest economic incomes, a moment later Leopold’s semblances have fused with those of Sarastro, and son and father are singing a duet and arguing about Amadeus’ resolution to marry Costanze. In the last of these feverish visions, Mozart finds himself in a courtroom in the company of Joseph Haydn and Beethoven, or rather busts of these two, who figure as lawyers heatedly arguing respectively for and against Nyman’s prosecution. 

What is unintentionally ironic in this bizarre scene is that the charges of ‘cannibalisation of eighteen-century repertoire’[3] posed to Nyman are in reality so undisputed that the idea of them provoking a quarrel seems too fanciful even for such a surreal courtroom. As a matter of fact, the critical adversity towards Nyman has manifested itself through a fairly unanimous silence.[4] When a voice has risen to articulate the general indignation, Nyman’s use of pre-existing materials has often been the focus: ‘too overtly dependent’ and ‘facile’[5] , Nyman’s ‘parasitic’ appropriation of historical materials is considered to be the measure of his ‘commercial opportunism’.[6] 

From the beginning of his compositional career in the late 1970s to the very early 1990s, Nyman consistently and explicitly based his works on pre-existing materials. Within a fairly heterogeneous collection of materials, spanning a variety of Venetian popular songs arranged under the commission of Birtwistle for Goldoni’s Il Campiello (1976), numbers from Purcell’s King Arthur and The Fairy Queen re-written for Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Chopin’s Mazurkas used in the Celan Songs for Ute Lemper (1990), Mozart’s presence, even just on the basis of statistical considerations, had a prominent position, rising well above a case of occasional reference or circumstantial convenience. By the time of composing and directing his multimedia homage in 1991, Nyman had already acknowledged the significance of Mozart’s music for his work on a number of occasions and had explicitly used Mozart’s texts as pre-compositional material in several instances. In this study I will focus on three of these instances, namely: In Re Don Giovanni (1977), the first occurrence of Nyman’s use of Mozart’s music, based on the opening of Leporello’s aria ‘Madamina il Catalogo è Questo’; Trysting Fields (1988, originally written for Peter Greenaway’s movie Drowning By Numbers and later rearranged as a concert piece), based on the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K364;[7] and I Am an Unusual Thing (1991), the conclusive song of Letters, Riddles and Writs, based on materials from Mozart’s quartets K428 and K465, and the last of Nyman’s explicit uses of Mozart’s music.

My discussion of these recompositions will focus on how stylistic codes and aesthetic markers of Mozart’s music could be reinterpreted and appropriated by Nyman in order to satisfy specific ideological and expressive needs. This implies first of all situating Nyman’s practice in its proper compositional network. Together with the explicit use of second-hand materials, Nyman’s appropriations of Mozart display a strong affiliation with the aesthetic of ‘reduction’ and ‘simplicity’ proper to minimal music.

One of the major differences I’ve always drawn as a critic and as a composer between the European minimalists and the American [is that] our tradition is European, and I get all my musical kicks and ideas from the European symphonic tradition… my clothes are Mozart.[8]

The combination of minimalism and ‘explicit intertextuality’[9] taking place in Nyman’s appropriations will be considered both synchronically and diachronically: through analysis of In Re Don Giovanni and Trysting Fields I will thematise and discuss two specific aspects arising from this combination; in my discussion of I Am an Unusual Thing I will argue that Nyman’s constructions of Mozart change over time in relation to Nyman’s increasing departure from the structural and expressive limitations of minimalism and explicit intertextuality. The two streams of minimalism and intertextuality thus define the theoretical field within which my discussion will move.

The cultural environment within which these two streams run is that of ‘postmodernism’. Despite the well-rehearsed dangers of the term’s elusiveness,[10] relating Nyman’s appropriation of Mozart to the cultural trend of postmodernism is unavoidable at least in the sense that Nyman’s practice openly defines itself against the international style of musical modernism.[11]

Nyman’s brief description of his use of Mozart’s music (above) suggests another sense in which his appropriations could be described as ‘postmodern’. I am referring not to Nyman’s claim of imposing a ‘postmodern aesthetic’ on Mozart (a statement which rather provides an example of a misuse of the term as conciliatory and self-explanatory), but to Nyman’s promotion of his readings of Mozart as simultaneously ‘authentic’ (insightful and ‘educational’), and ‘inauthentic’ (resulting from the deliberate imposition of a contemporary aesthetic perspective). While on one hand the problematic amalgamation of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ is intrinsic to any process of reception, being unavoidably linked to the recipient’s shifting aesthetic position, on the other hand this amalgamation acquires a specific relevance within the postmodern discourse, where the ‘confusion’ of codes is deliberately embraced and thematised.

In the specifics of this study, the postmodern debate will provide a theoretical framework for two aspects of Nyman’s appropriations of Mozart and for the general nature of the contradictions that these two aspects raise. The first of these aspects regards Nyman’s use of Mozart as a ‘cultural pivot’ used to efface distinctions between high and mass culture; the second will concern Nyman’s use of Mozart as a ‘mask’, a way of bypassing a felt inability to ‘present things directly’ provoked by the awareness of the ‘already-written’. These two major issues, the bridging of the ‘Great Divide’[12] and the embracement of what, paraphrasing Genette, could be called an ‘expressivity of the second degree’, are primarily related respectively to the minimalist and intertextual streams of Nyman’s cultural network, and have been considered trademarks of postmodernism by both its supporters and detractors.

Nyman’s palimpsests, when interpreted in these terms, reveal a mixture of critical and affirmative elements. Distinctions have been made between a ‘postmodernism of reaction’, characterised by total condemnation of modernism as a cultural mistake and exploitation of the cultural codes of tradition for programmatic and affirmative purposes, and a ‘postmodernism of resistance’ that arises as a ‘counter-practice […] to the official culture of modernism’ but avoids ‘the “false normativity” of reactionary postmodernism’ and is concerned with a critical deconstruction of cultural codes rather than a return to them.[13] On the one hand this framework will provide the background for my discussion of the affirmative and critical implications of Nyman’s appropriations of Mozart; on the other hand, while mapping out these implications, I will argue that seeing Nyman’s practice as either affirmative or critical simply won’t do. The interest of Nyman’s appropriation of Mozart lies precisely in its ‘ambidexterity’, a third feature of Nyman’s practice that resonates with the discourse of postmodernism, that seemingly paradoxical ‘mixture of the complicitous and the critical’[14] which constitutes the focus of my investigation.

The Effortlessness of In Re Don Giovanni (1977)

You listen to a very, very simple bit of Mozart; it’s like a folk song and it’s done effortlessly. It has more overpowering effect than something where a lot of work has been expended.
Michael Nyman.[15]

In Re Don Giovanni(1977), based on the declamatory opening of Leporello’s aria Madamina Il Catalogo è Questo from Mozart’s opera, combines two seemingly contradictory aspects. It presents Mozart’s opening virtually untouched, with no alterations to its melodic and harmonic structure, while at the same time standing as a manifesto of Nyman’s compositional practice:

Uno dei miei primi pezzi, In Re Don Giovanni, contiene, racchiuse nel nucleo di pochissimi minuti, molte delle caratteristiche stilistiche presenti nelle mie opere successive. Se osservi quella partitura puoi intuire in che maniera si sarebbero sviluppate le cose, e questa musica e’ nata all’improvviso in me, in maniera quasi magica.

[One of my earliest compositions, In Re Don Giovanni, contains, in a nutshell, many of the stylistic features characterising my following works. By analysing that score you will be able to see how my music would have developed, a music that was born in me all of a sudden, almost magically.][16]

Indeed in its literal reliance on Mozart’s text, which blurs the edges between reception and recomposition, and in its combination of the two repertoires with which Nyman had been most involved in his activity as editor and critic – the eighteenth-century repertoire and the American experimental tradition – In Re don Giovanni functions as an ideal watershed between Nyman’s roles as a critic and as a composer.[17]

Nyman makes two alterations to Mozart’s text: he dislocates the texture so that its four layers appear one by one through four cyclic repetitions of the opening sixteen bars, and he assigns Leporello’s line to a solo trombone. These alterations emphasise the convergence between certain stylistic codes of Mozart’s text and defining stylistic and technical features of minimalism. The combination of a very small degree of intervention in Mozart’s text on the one hand and the total appropriation of its stylistic codes on the other is crucial to the ironic presentation of Mozart as a ‘minimalist avant la lettre’: through these stylistic convergences, Nyman suggests an ideal kinship between Mozart and minimalism, a kinship centred on a constellation of aesthetic markers such as ‘simplicity’, ‘effortlessness’ and ‘universality’. These markers, implicitly relying on familiar traits of Mozart’s musicological and popular images, are used by Nyman to turn Mozart into the perfect partisan for his anti-modernist agenda, allowing the provocative gathering, in the name of an aesthetic unburdened by intellectual complications, of the popular directedness of Rock, the alleged grammatical simplicity of Mozart’s music, and the tonal reductionism of minimalism.

First layer: the universality of Mozart’s pulse and harmony

The conception of In Re Don Giovanni as a manifesto of Nyman’s personal brand of minimalism is reinforced by the title. While stating the tonality of Mozart’s aria, this title also alludes to Terry Riley’s seminal work In C (1964), a work that introduced into the experimental tradition two apparently innocuous but contextually revolutionary features that would become defining aspects of minimalism: the reference to tonal harmony, and the installation of regular pulse.

On the broadest level, In Re Don Giovanni’s intended ‘confusion’ between Mozart and minimalism takes place precisely via the idea of stable pulse and tonal diatonicism. It is through the embracement of these two macro-features that minimalism seemed to provide for Nyman an aesthetic attitude that would legitimise some sort of liberating reconciliation of his split interests between the ‘rock revolution’ of the 60s and the ‘classical’ tradition:

Because I was educated as a dyed-in-the-wool classicist (I was a musicologist), all my musical allegiances were toward tonal harmony and melody. Minimalism said ‘you can use tonal chords, you can use regular pulse,’ and, of course that tied in with the kind of music I was listening to in the late sixties – Terry Riley, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground.[18]

In In Re Don Giovanni the pulsating quavers of the aria are extrapolated from their context and brought to the fore, suggesting a relationship with minimalism’s ‘explicit quantizing of musical time’[19] and with the steady beat of rock textures.[20] The temporal dislocation that brings the pulsating quavers to the fore is itself an allusion to rock and the stereotypical gradual layering of instrumentation prompted by the development of multi-track recording.[21]

Closed in bar 16, Mozart’s harmonic progression acquires a cyclical quality which suits the extension through obsessive repetition characteristic of minimalist constructions. On a generic level, the harmonic quality of Mozart’s segment is largely compatible with the minimalist predilection for plain triads and diatonic collections and with the characteristic third-relationships and formulaic bass-motion of Rock progressions. On a more specific level, it is the highly patterned quality of Mozart’s progression, emphasised by Nyman’s loop, that makes Mozart’s passage suitable to being ‘confused’ with the characteristically single-minded, ‘automatic’ quality of minimalist processes. Fig.1 shows the various levels of harmonic patterning in bb.1-16 (M)[22] .

Fig.1: Mozart, ‘Madamina, il Catalogo è Questo’ (from Don Giovanni), chordal reduction of Vl.II and Vla. in bars 1-16. Square brackets indicating the patterning of Mozart’s Progression.

The implicit cultural subtext of these broad stylistic convergences is a problematisation of the ‘Great Divide’ between high art and mass culture. Related to this divide, Nyman’s description of his aesthetic as ‘postmodern’ gains some substance. The challenge to the Great Divide, part of a general questioning of the legitimation of aesthetic, cultural, and social discourses on which musical modernism has insisted and constructed itself as an ‘adversary culture’,[23] is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the use of the term ‘postmodern’ as descriptive of a number of cultural products emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century.

In Re Don Giovanni displays not only this postmodern aspiration to cut across the Great Divide, but also the problematic oscillation between the critical potentials and affirmative dangers that this de-legitimisation of categories implies. Not surprisingly, Nyman’s comments show an attempt to sharpen the critical edge of his crossovers by presenting them as a rebuttal of the strategies of exclusion adopted by musical modernism, whose aesthetic is essentially characterised by Nyman as ‘dominant but dead’, to use Habermas’ formula:[24] ‘dead’ in its impassiveness to the significance of the mass-media-generated coexistence of high and low art, and thus inadequate to grasp the current cultural reality; ‘dominant’ in its institutionalised support of the Great Divide via the academy and related institutions which, as Middleton puts it, ‘continue in [their] role of building “cultural capital”, marking social distinction and excluding those with unapproved tastes’:[25]

It seems crazy to write a kind of music today which doesn’t acknowledged the existence of pop music. For the Stockhausens and Birtwistles of this world to totally discard and scorn that music as a phenomenon seems nonsensical.[26]

When I was a student between ’61 and ’64 I wrote in a kind of a Hindemith-Shostakovich style. Then I came in contact with the Manchester school – Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, and Goehr – and it was de rigueur then not only to write serial music but to consider any other music that wasn’t serial as the music of idiots. You couldn’t even show any allegiance to Benjamin Britten! Everything was Darmstadt, this post-Webern serial nonsense. I tried to write one serial piece, but I gave up. And I didn’t write a single note from ’64 to ’76, because I couldn’t come to terms with writing serial music.[27]

The Mozart of In Re Don Giovanni plays a crucial role in Nyman’s attempt to blur the Great Divide and find compositional alternatives: as Mozart’s text provides Nyman with an opportunity to refer and gather under the same text stylistic codes of classicism, minimalism, and rock, so Mozart as a cultural icon serves as symbolic pivot between cultural hierarchies of high and low. Mozart can exploit this pivoting role by serving at the same time as a stamp of value, which answers the needs of validation of the Nyman ‘dyed-in-the-wool classicist and musicologist’, and as a popularised low-brow icon, part of daily life from the movie theatre to television ads, and thus answering to the Nyman dissatisfied with the elitism of the modernist institutionalisation of high culture and interested in widening the audiences of contemporary composition.

In this sense, Nyman’s Mozart in In Re Don Giovanni shows a collusion with the long-established image of Mozart as a universal, democratic icon.[28] Mozart’s ‘democratic universality’, or, from a postmodern perspective, his ability to cut across the Great Divide, is implicitly related by Nyman to the alleged ‘effortlessness’ of Mozart’s writing:

You listen to a very, very simple bit of Mozart; it’s like a folk song and it’s done effortlessly. It has more overpowering effect than something where a lot of work has been expended.[29]

Nyman is here reiterating and reinterpreting a trope that characterises both the scholarly and popularly constructed images of the composer.[30] As Christoph Wolff sums up, this notion of effortlessness is embedded in a rich network of biographical tropes and ideological judgements, the notion of the ‘untutored genius’, the ideal of everlasting purity and simplicity:

The prevailing popular image of Mozart the composer is that of the prototypical musical prodigy, a genius blessed with heavenly gifts, who effortlessly created works of great beauty, deep expression, and exemplary perfection.[31]

In Nyman’s description and appropriation of Mozart’s ‘very very simple bits’, the myth of Mozart’s effortlessness implicitly resonates with the anti-academicism of the experimental tradition, and is basically transformed into a slogan for the problematisation of the relationship between the academic discourse and musical value in contemporary music.

Nyman’s use of Mozart is in fact oriented against a specific criterion of musical value that is sustained by the academic discourse: that of ‘intellectual complexity’. In his essay ‘Against Intellectual Complexity in Music’, written simultaneously with In Re Don Giovanni,[32] Nyman describes the aesthetic of ‘simplicity’ of trends coming from the Cage experience (in particular Morton Feldman’s music and minimalism) in contraposition with the radicalisation of ‘intellectual complexity’ characterising the high modernism of Darmstadt.

[…] the aesthetic, structural, and expressive requirements of the so-called New Simplicity demand the development of a totally different, independent (some might say naïve, innocent, and simple-minded) compositional methodology.[33]

By allying, through In Re Don Giovanni, Mozart’s alleged ‘grammatical simplicity’ with the aesthetic of ‘New Simplicity’ of minimalism, and against the intellectual complexity of modernism, Nyman is performing a variation on an ideological use of Mozart that has countless precedents. This ideological use is patently based on an understanding of Mozart’s style not as an idiosyncratic performance of the tonal grammar in its specific historical moment (and thus in this sense characterised by a relative grammatical simplification if intended as increasing stylisation in harmonic functionality and phrasing), but as a ‘universal’, ‘natural’ mode of expression that can be used by Nyman as an argument against what he believes to be the abstruse, artificial intellectualism of total serialism, as it was raised at the turn of the century as an antidote to the complexity and emotional exaggeration of expressionism, or by the anti-Wagnerians as the ‘true nature of musical art against [Wagner’s] “unnatural”, deceptive technique’.[34]

In the post-tonal practice, the ideological use of this idealised Mozart took historically two forms: that of using Mozart as a ‘weapon against the seemingly radical surface of new music per se’[35] or as the model of inspiration for a specific school of contemporary composition, as happened during the neoclassical debate. Nyman’s appropriation of Mozart shows both tendencies.

On the one hand, in his aggressiveness towards modernism, in his generalised re-embracement of ‘pulse’ and ‘tonality’, and in his evocation of Mozart’s ‘effortlessness’, Nyman shows a collusion with a reactionary cultivation of Mozart to the detriment of a renewal of the materials of contemporary music. In this sense, Nyman’s appropriation provides an example of Botstein’s argument of a linkage between the postmodern popularisation of Mozart and the marginalisation of new music.[36]

On the other hand, however, In Re Don Giovanni cannot be totally assimilated to such aesthetics of reaction. As details of Nyman’s palimpsest suggest, Mozart’s text is not used as a static object of cult, a sample of ‘classical perfection’, but as a sophisticated material that well suits the minimalist interest in the primary blocks of tonality and in basic processes of pattern perception, and thus can function as an inspiration for new compositional solutions.

Final layer: the sophisticated simplicity of Leporello’s ‘additive’ line

In the second (bb.17-32) and third (bb.33-48) repetition of Mozart’s opening, Nyman establishes the textural and rhythmic frame in which Leporello’s line, played by a solo trombone, can finally fall into place.

Without interferences of any sort, Leporello’s line is transformed: against the pulsating regularity of the gradually established textural and rhythmic frame, the rhythmic-metric subtleties of the declamatory line stand out sharply, its modular nature is thus highlighted and reinterpreted in minimalist terms. This ‘reinterpretation’ is obtained by revealing a curious stylistic convergence between the structure of Leporello’s line and one of the characteristic technical devices of minimalism: the additive rhythmic process intensively used by Philip Glass in his early minimalist pieces. As Nyman notes:

The essence of Glass’s music is […] contained in a rhythmic piece called 1+1 (1968). This is for a single player who taps rhythms on an amplified table or other surface; what he taps is derived from two tiny rhythmic figures which he can repeat and combine in any way he likes. All Glass’s ensemble pieces are based on this additive rhythm process which is applied to the melodic lines which provide the continuity of the music, in an unending flow of regular quavers.[37]

Fig.2 shows bb.1-7 of Leporello’s line text read through the technique of additive process.

Fig.2: Mozart, 'Madamina il Catalogo è Questo' (from Don Giovanni) bb.1-7 of Leporello’s declamatory line read in additive terms.

At the same time, in In Re Don Giovanni, this additive process evokes a second characteristic technical device of minimalism: the progressive metric shifting epitomised by Steve Reich’s phase processes. Reich’s clearest presentation of these processes is arguably found in Clapping Music, where the metric relationship between two identical rhythmic patterns progressively shifts as the second performer shortens his pattern of a quaver every twelve repetitions. The musical and aesthetic significance of these processes lies in the achievement of complex patterns of inner stresses and metric subtleties through the most economical and systematic means. The rhythmic-metric subtlety of Leporello’s line is suitable to be read in these terms: as the basic motivic unit undergoes rhythmic addition, it shifts its metric position within the 4/4 frame, and, most importantly, it shifts its position in respect to the two fixed patterns of the violins and celli in which it is embedded, resulting in a variety of metric relationships between the patterns (fig.3).

Fig.3 Mozart, Madamina, il Catalogo e’ Questo (from Don Giovanni) bb.1-7, rhythmic reduction showing the shifting alignment between Leporello’s additive line and the regular rotation of the arpeggio rhythmic-motif.

Although the additive and phase process is rigorously sustained for just bb.1-7, the additive quality of Leporello’s line extends to bar 10, creating a modular structure that increases from 3 to 5, 7 and 11 crotchets length.

By reading these details of Mozart’s text through the constructivism of minimalist processes, Nyman plays on shifting the significance of these sixteen bars. From ‘a subtle and exquisitely calculated piece of rhetoric’[38] , Leporello’s aria becomes a matter of perception of design: of foreground/background figures, of additive processes, of shifting metric relationships.

Cage’s famous distinction between an ‘old music… which has to do with conceptions and their communication, and […] new music which has nothing to do with communication of concepts, only to do with perception’[39] seems then indicative of the deep aesthetic shift taking place through Nyman’s very limited intervention in the piece. The link between minimalism and perception[40] is in fact at the basis of the aesthetic ‘literalism’ of minimalism: since the process is meant to embody ‘itself without any mediation’, ‘no longer […] referring to something outside itself’[41] the perception of the process becomes the bottom line of aesthetic appreciation.[42]

In Re Don Giovanni, by creating the ironic illusion that the musical relationships of Mozart’s text are process-determined, makes Mozart’s text compatible with such aesthetic requirements. The disappearance of Leporello’s voice is of course a step towards this illusion, not just because it eradicates textual, ‘extramusical’ references, but also because, by removing the level of continuity provided by the verbal dimension of Leporello’s melody, it enables a modular interpretation of its relationships, which in turn is necessary to create the impression that these are process-determined.

The emphasis on perception has another important implication. In experimental music, perceptual subtlety is presented as the counterpart of a reduction in grammatical complexity: the claim of minimalism is to shift the focus away from the abstract, intellectual complexity of fixed musical relationships towards the perceptual, audible subtleties arising from the processing of simple musical material. As the simple shapes of minimal art and sculpture are meant to reintroduce sensitivity to detail by creating a subtle dialogue between a clearly projected gestalt and minor displacements and disturbances,[43] so analogously, in minimal music, the reduction of information to basic textural and harmonic elements is supposed to create a situation in which any change and irregularity of the ongoing pattern will be audible and significant.

It is in this context that Nyman’s verbal praise and musical appropriation of this ‘simple bit’ of Mozart’s aria can be most profitably situated. Mozart’s ‘simplicity’, from a minimalist perspective, is not the indicator of ‘classical perfection’ but the source of fine nuances and the basis for the appreciation of discrete irregularities in patterning and phrasing. In this way the appropriation of Mozart’s language meets Nyman’s purpose to problematise the notion of overt complexity and advocate a fresh interest in the potential subtlety of simplicity in new music.

By means of highlighting the (‘authentic’) rhetorical subtleties of Mozart’s declamatory line and by reading them through the (deliberately ‘inauthentic’) minimalist concern with process, perception, and literalism, Mozart’s text becomes a resource for the articulation of new musical meaning.[44] The buffo humour of the original text is thus renewed in the ironic ‘confusion’ of Mozart for a minimalist, and the piece is invested with a new cultural significance, becoming ‘about’ a problematisation of the Great Divide and of the notion of intellectual complexity, the main aesthetic and technical criteria through which the Divide is sustained by the modernist discourse.

The critical potential of this reinterpretation of Mozart’s stylistic codes is, however, inextricably tied to the programmatic and affirmative aspects of Nyman’s appropriation. Nyman’s motivations are clear: ‘spreading’ Mozart’s pulse, harmony and ‘effortlessness’ across intellectual compartments, he creates a space in which stylistic and cultural hierarchies are flattened, and his music can emerge, ‘almost magically’, as he says (above).

The affirmative dangers of this operation can be noticed by looking at the effect that it has on the image of Mozart. Mozart, I have argued, can function as pivot between high and low culture because of his permeation of the whole cultural spectrum. This permeation creates the impression that we are in front of a sole phenomenon, a Mozart who, thanks to his mythical universality, brings together, ‘democratically’, high and low, flattening their distinction, whereas in fact Mozart can permeate the cultural spectrum precisely because of his ability to change function and identity according to the specific cultural network and intellectual compartment in which he is integrated.

In Re Don Giovanni’s flattening of high and low categories then necessarily rests on the affirmation of the popularised image of a ‘universal Mozart’ as a positive image. This means reducing the multi-faceted complexity and sophistication of Mozart’s music and image to its lowest common denominator, which is to say to stylistic indicators of ‘simplicity’ and ‘effortlessness’, elected for their collusion with Nyman’s personal agenda.

The Poignancy of Trysting Fields (1988)

‘Trysting Fields’… puts under a microscope… Mozart’s ‘affective’ deployment of the accented appoggiatura which partly accounts for the poignancy of this movement – a poignancy which I deliberately allowed to reach into my soundtrack.
Michael Nyman[45]

Trysting Fields (1988)[46], palimpsest on the second movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K364 for violin and viola, seems based on an ambiguity: Nyman’s total reliance on Mozart’s text and materials could be seen at the same time as a way of distancing himself from expressive responsibilities, and of insinuating expressivity, by means of ‘deliberately allowing’ Mozart’s ‘poignancy’, as Nyman says, into the score.

This seeming paradox, I will argue, has its foundations in the experimental tradition, and it allowed Nyman to preserve the impersonal attitude of minimalism and at the same time to reveal and broaden the expressive potentials hiding behind that impersonal attitude. After tracing and delineating this ‘masked’ re-introduction of expressivity, I will propose two different hypothesis for the interpretation of Trysting Fields: in a first scenario, Nyman relies on Mozart’s culturally ingrained stylistic codes in order to recuperate a shared language within which expressive directedness can be reclaimed; according to scenario number two, Nyman’s reliance on Mozart’s stylistic gestures, rather than proposing a restorative solution to the loss of a common practice, expresses the impossibility of regaining that expressive directedness. Via analysis of Trysting Fields I will discuss how Nyman’s appropriation of Mozart presents both the affirmative dangers and critical potentials that scenarios number one and two respectively imply.

Mozart’s text as a gradual process

The whole material of Trysting Fields is based on Mozart’s Andante, more specifically, on its accented appoggiaturas:

When I started analysing the musical structure of the slow movement I noticed that Mozart consistently used two decorative tricks of which the first – accented appoggiaturas – provides the complete substance of Trysting Fields. Basically I ‘sampled’ each of these appoggiaturas … repeated it three times…and moved on to the next one so that a totally new harmonic/melodic continuity is created which is so familiarly Mozartian but yet which self-evidently is not.[47]

The composition’s total reliance on a pre-existing text poses, in a particularly severe way, the general problem of dealing with the overt, surface presence of historical material in contemporary music, which is to say the problem of considering this overt presence in its own terms rather than pitching it against models of confrontation with the past which are deemed ‘deeper’ in that they suit our interpretative and analytical concern with the unveiling of subcutaneous structural relationships and influences.

Rather than dismissing it at the outset as ‘too facile’ or ‘parasitical’, Nyman’s overt reliance on Mozart’s text can be discussed in relation to the problematisation of the authorial subject radically posed by Cage and permeating the experimental tradition as a whole. Cage, equating authorial subjectivity with the composer’s control of musical relationships, from the fifties onwards employed chance procedures to refuse the traditional function of the ‘work’ as a means of self-expression and embrace an ideal of authorial impersonality. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this aspect of the Cage experience. To Nyman, the concern with impersonality seems to be the thread uniting the experimental tradition, to the point that at some stage he proposes to call the experimental aesthetic ‘New Objectivity’. The experimental composer, Nyman argues, ‘no longer feels the necessity of consciously influencing the creative process at every moment’.[48] Quoting Michael Parson, he argues that

[…] whatever structural concerns, whatever iconography, whatever seeming contradictions between one ‘movement’ and another, there remains this consistency: that composers ‘treat sound not as material to be ordered and put into meaningful symbolic forms as a medium for human expression, but as something autonomous and impersonal’.[49]

Methodologically, the ‘objectivity’ of the experimental tradition lies in the determination of a variety of procedures and systems which allow the composer to distance himself from the materials. If at one extreme of a spectrum of procedures we place Cage, his chance-based methods, and the radical unfixing of relationships, on the other side, Nyman suggests, we should place minimalism, with its reliance on systems and processes which, as Reich famously postulated in his manifesto ‘Music as a Gradual Process’, once set in motion, determine ‘automatically’ the moment to moment unfolding of relations and the scale of the piece.[50] Nyman places himself on Reich’s side of the spectrum: 

Cage’s music… then, is just one extreme of the New Simplicity, where all musical events, devoid of intentional relationships, are of equal importance. The opposite extreme, represented in America by the music of Terry Riley, Reich, Glass, Young, and Jon Gibson, and in England by Gavin Bryars, John White, Christopher Hobbs, and myself, is closely related conceptually, methodologically, and structurally to Cage, even when its purposes and methods appear to contradict this relation.[51]

However, by calling the aesthetic attitude of the experimental tradition ‘objective’, Nyman risks obliterating the dialectical tension between objectivity and authorship which is intrinsic to the problem of compositional control and crucial to understand his own reliance on Mozart’s music. This tension at the core of the experimental tradition is clearly articulated by Morton Feldman:

The question continually on my mind all these years is: to what degree does one give up control, and still keep the last vestige where one can call the work one’s own? Everyone must find his own answer here…[52]  

When read as Nyman’s personal answer to the question of compositional control in the terms posed by the experimental tradition, the overt reliance on Mozart’s text can be understood in its methodological and aesthetic relevance: the pre-existing text substitutes the role played by the ‘impersonal’ processes of minimal music. Nyman’s control is largely limited to the choice of the hypotext and the definition of the procedures through which it will be processed (Fig.4). Then, as with the gradual processes of minimal music, the unfolding of Mozart’s text through these procedures determines, with a few exceptions that I will consider later, every moment-to-moment detail and overall scale of the hypertext.

Fig.4: Nyman, Trysting Fields, ‘impersonal’ processing of Mozart’s K364, ii.    

Mozart’s materials as both ‘primary’ and ‘already-written’

In Trysting Fields, by dropping a large part of his authorial responsibility through the reliance on relationships mapped out by a pre-existing text, Nyman opens up a theoretical framework in which minimalism and explicit intertextuality are combined to generate a particular species of ‘impersonality’.

The alliance of minimalism and intertextuality is peculiar and apparently contradictory. The typical materials of minimalism stand in opposition to the very notion of intertextuality in that they are meant to be objects of supposed neutrality, primary structures which are impersonal, anti-historical, de-actorial, aiming at the total omission of the semantic level[53] and at neutralisation of any reference to previous experiences.[54] On the other hand, although seemingly irreconcilable in their materials, minimalism and intertextuality converge in a problematisation of the authorial subject: whereas minimalism attempts to neutralise the authorial subject by avoiding traces of human presence in the material and in its processing, explicit intertextuality characteristically problematises the authorial subject by dissolving its identity in the ‘already-written’.

Mozart’s materials, through Nyman’s operations, satisfy the requirements of both minimalism and intertextuality. Fig.5 shows the status of the materials of Trysting Fields as placed somewhere between the ‘already-written’, historically-situated, semantically charged intertextual source, and relatively a-historical ‘archetypical patterns’, basic eighteenth-century melodic and harmonic models which are so culturally ingrained and common that they can be considered to stand as relatively neutral building blocks of the tonal language.[55] In relation with the intertextual source, Trysting Fields’ materials are reduced and incomplete; in relation with the archetypical patterns, they are embellished and incomplete. These two seemingly irreconcilable conditions, as reduced intertextual source or as embellished primitive building structures, are simultaneously embodied by Trysting Fields’ materials.

Fig.5: Trysting Fields’ materials between ‘already written’ and ‘archetypical structures’.
Fig.5(a): Mozart, K364,ii, bb.9-16, piano reduction;
Fig.5(b): Nyman, Trysting Fields, b.1 and b.4, piano reduction;
Fig.5(c): ‘changing note archetype’ 1-7-2-1.

Reading Fig.5 top-down, which is to say from the original to the processed intertextual source, Nyman’s text appears as a ‘reduction’ of Mozart’s materials in a sense analogous to the ‘smoothing over the details of execution’ through which minimalist artists would try to keep the surfaces of their works in unworked states.[56] In minimal art this procedure would be ‘aimed in part at achieving an impersonal quality, avoiding the depiction of personality that most minimalist artists felt had become entirely too explicit’.[57] In Trysting Fields, via reduction of the melodic elaboration of the Andante, the aesthetic individuality of the materials is faded: Mozart’s ‘already-written’ materials, reduced to incomplete and barely adorned frames of archetypical harmonic progressions, tend towards the abstract level of primary structures.[58]

On the other hand, reading the graph from bottom-up, which is to say from the minimal, abstract ‘changing note archetype’ towards a reintroduction of the details of Mozart’s surface, Nyman’s operation can be conceptualised as one of ‘restoration’ of those traces of historical and actorial presence that minimal art consciously tries to reject from its material and processes. In the words of James Pierce:  

The Minimalist insistence on anonymity and the conscious rejection of skill for its own sake intensifies, rather than weakens, the expression of pure Mind. … Minimalists are fully aware of the capabilities of art and the broad range of skill and expression revealed during its ‘melancholy process’ over the centuries. Their conscious rejection of complexity and emotionalism, then, becomes a positive expressive act.[59]

Because of the ‘conscious rejection’ of these traces of expression, minimal art and music can be argued to ‘negatively affirm’ these traces, which remain present in the work through their felt absence, as it were.  Nyman, by incorporating Mozart’s appoggiatura in the minimal materials of Trysting Fields, makes visible one of those traces of gesture and expressivity usually latent in minimalist processes.

Mozart as a ‘mask’

The particular species of impersonality generated by Nyman’s fusion of minimalism and intertextuality in Trysting Fields can, then, be said to contain the seeds of its own corruption: however ‘impersonal&#