Back in 1993 I saw the film The Piano, and was sort of irritated by it, even though I knew it was a piece of great filmmaking. Two things really bugged me: one, that they didn’t drag that expensive instrument about 12 yards farther up the beach; and secondly, why did Holly Hunter’s character Ada play music which was so modern for the film’s setting in 1850’s New Zealand?

Everything else about the film was obviously historically correct – the costumes, the dwellings. Nyman’s music (whilst atmospheric and wonderful) stood out to me as totally anachronistic – as if Holly Hunter had been playing a modern Steinway D model, or Harvey Keitel had worn a T-shirt with an Adidas logo.

Zoom forward to last week, when I was able to sit down with Michael Nyman and interview him as part of the Sydney Conservatorium’s 101 Compositions series. The Con has commissioned a number of well-known composers to write music leading up to the institution’s 100th Anniversary, and I have been asked over the next few years to interview the composers about their works and themselves. John Corigliano, Peter Sculthorpe, and Carl Vine are already in the bag, and it was time to meet Michael Nyman.

We spent a good 45 minutes chatting away about his life and career, until I came to my big question, which I never thought I’d be able to ask in person: how did he come up with the theme of The Piano, and why did he write it in such a modern idiom?

He was happy to discuss this. Jane Campion had given him a script with all the various points that would be required of the music – the character of Ada (Holly Hunter) was a mute, so Campion wanted her to speak through the piano. Nyman asked Campion to write what Ada would have been saying in these moments – an internal script – then set off to consider what sort of style the music would take. The character was from remote Scotland so he thought that she definitely wouldn’t have been playing the drawing room music of the day – no Mendelssohn or Chopin or John Field. In her isolation, Ada would have found her own musical voice. Assisted by his background as a musicologist, Nyman searched out Scottish folk tunes and music of the mid-1800s, stumbling upon a tune (with a name like Gloomy Winter’s Day, I think) that was then rearranged into Nyman style, and became the famous and best-selling theme of the The Piano: The Heart Asks Pleasure First.

(Incidentally, Holly Hunter also recorded all her own piano music for the film, and then acted to its playback – a feat that Nyman said he found thrilling and extraordinary.)

It was wonderful to meet the composer, and to find the answer to a question that had sat at the back of my brain for 18 years!

Read Limelight‘s interview with Michael Nyman here.