a source-studies approach to michael nyman's score

Journal of Film Music 3.2 (2011) 155-170 ISSN (print) 1087-7142doi:10.1558/jfm.v3i2.155 ISSN (online) 1758-860X

© Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

FOX: I suppose […] you still haven’t worked with your ideal film collaborator in the shape of a director?

NYMAN: I’m constantly asked this question. It would have to be Greenaway because, you know, in the five or six feature films that I did with him, the music is allowed to breathe, and as a composer I was given freedom to create with as few restraints as possible at the point of composing. At the point of synchronising the music with the picture then it’s sort of taken out of your hands.1

1 David Cooper, Christopher Fox, and Ian Sapiro, eds., CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 179.

***

NYMAN: […] no film apart from a Greenaway film is open enough to accept any kind of music.2

Introduction

Although Michael Nyman has achieved considerable success as a composer for both experimental and mainstream cinema, he found the most significant creative autonomy in his collaborations with the

2 Ibid., 171.

A Source-Studies Approach to Michael Nyman’s Score for The Draughtsman’s Contract

DAvID COOPErSchool of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, West Yorkshire, [email protected]

IAN SAPIrOSchool of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, West Yorkshire, [email protected]

Abstract: The composer Michael Nyman has donated a unique collection of his original sound materials and other documentation to the University of Leeds on long-term loan for scholarly investigation. There are more than 500 individual items in the archive, which includes film, television and concert music, as well as associated items of paperwork, and the films directed by Peter Greenaway feature strongly in the collection.

Evidence for the underlying creative processes in film composition can be found within the source materials which include the source recordings and stereo mixdowns of cues, materials often disposed of by film and television companies after a film’s release or Tv program’s broadcast. This article questions the extent to which the surviving audio and supporting documentary materials reflect the development of the score and the relationships between Nyman’s music and Greenaway’s images as exemplified in the non-mainstream film The Draughtsman’s Contract.

Keywords: Nyman; The Draughtsman’s Contract; film score; source studies; archive

ARTICLE

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

156 THE JOUrNAL OF FILM MUSIC

© The International Film Music Society 2011.

director Peter Greenaway, as the opening quotations suggest. The films on their own give little indication of the processes by which their scores were crafted, and in this paper we draw on the evidence provided in an archive of primary sonic, textual, and visual materials held by the University of Leeds, and a model of conventional scoring practice, to theorize Nyman’s approach in his music for The Draughtsman’s Contract.

We argue that, while the underlying technical phases of this model of production may be broadly retained, the elaboration or refinement of the musical material in relation to the visual component is significantly different in this film, notably the absence of documentation relating to spotting and synchronization. Other materials in the archive indicate that this approach is characteristic of Nyman’s working methods for Greenaway’s films.

Michael Nyman and Non-Mainstream Film Scoring

Michael Nyman’s career as film composer began in 1976, with his score for the bawdy British comedy film Keep it Up Downstairs, a spoof of the popular British television drama series Upstairs, Downstairs. This followed a period of twelve years of compositional silence during which he worked in a series of art schools and as a music critic for The Spectator and Music and Musicians. In 1974 he wrote his influential monograph on the experimental tradition Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond.3 Nyman has remarked that period music was required for Keep it Up Downstairs, and that the recovery and discovery of “low-grade music” was a “collective interest” of an influential group of experimental composers, including Hobbs, Shrapnell, Skempton, and White.4 In discussion with Christopher Fox, Nyman noted that “when I was asked to do a mainstream film that involved Edwardian music I knew it, so all I had to do was take an Ezra reid piece from out of this Scratch Orchestra context and put it into an EMI film context; from there, as a resourceful composer, it was pretty easy to do my own Edwardian pastiche.”5

Nyman brought to film scoring both what he considered as “calculated re-articulation of the classics,”6 and a concern for musical process from his

3 (London: Studio vista, 1974).4 Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 166-67.5 Ibid., 167.6 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 162.

interest in experimentalism. The latter is illustrated by his score for Peter Greenaway’s 1-100, for which the director apparently requested music that would provide a rhythm to which he could edit the film. This Nyman describes as “a kind of numerical piece, arranged so that there was a series of 1 to 100 chords which got longer and longer and longer, because 100 is longer than 1.”7 For Pwyll ap Siôn:

A key element in understanding the Nyman–Greenaway collaboration lies in the unique relationship formed between sound and image in their work. The role of film music traditionally has been to enhance and heighten the film’s visual and emotive qualities. Nyman and Greenaway established a radical alternative approach where music existed separately and autonomously from the visual narrative.8

This view of the interactions between the visual and auditory fields appears to be confirmed by Nyman’s publicly and privately expressed views about the working relationship between Greenaway and himself.

Elsewhere, we have described how evidence for the underlying creative processes in film composition can be found within the source materials, and how their “archaeology” can reveal valuable interpretative insights.9 Similarly, recent publications by Miguel Mera and David Burnand have drawn on testimony from composers to further elucidate the creation, development, and function of their film scores, and are part of a growing body of scholarship which utilizes a source-studies approach.10 Given the distinctions between Nyman’s approach to film scoring and that generally adopted in the cinematic mainstream, it seems appropriate to question the extent to which the surviving audio and supporting documentary materials reflect the development of the score and the relationships between Nyman’s music and Greenaway’s images. We consider here the approach exemplified by Nyman in The Draughtsman’s Contract, but before this can be addressed, the context of the source materials and their place within the film-scoring process must be established.

7 Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 167.8 Pwyll ap Siôn, The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 85.9 See Authors’ chapter in Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 17-32.10 Miguel Mera, Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007); David Burnand, “Scoring This Filthy Earth,” in European Film Music, ed. David Burnand and Miguel Mera (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 178-90.

157COOPEr AND SAPIrO


The Michael Nyman Archive

The composer Michael Nyman has donated a unique collection of his original sound materials and other documentation to the University of Leeds on long-term loan for scholarly investigation. There are more than 500 individual items in the archive, which includes film, television, and concert music, as well as associated items of paperwork (see Table 1). Films directed by Greenaway feature strongly in the collection, and these include: 1-100 (1978), The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), and Prospero’s Books (1991). There are also artefacts relating to mainstream feature films such as The Piano (directed by Jane Campion, 1993) and Christopher Hampton’s Carrington (1995). The television resources include the two series of the comedy drama Fairly Secret Army (1984 and 1986), the television opera The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1986), and a number of themes for advertisements. The audio resources, which include the source recordings and stereo mixdowns of cues, are stored on a wide range of analog and digital media formats, some of which are virtually redundant and as a result are largely inaccessible in their current form.

Materials relating to the works of some prominent film-score composers such as Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann are held at university libraries in the United States,11 but holdings such as those at the University of Leeds, which relate to scores by Trevor Jones as well as Michael Nyman, are extremely rare in the United Kingdom. Such resources can also be found in private collections, particularly those of the composers themselves, and it is possible that resources are retained in some studio libraries, though the extent of such collections is currently unknown and very difficult to estimate. Such materials have little or no value to film and television companies after a film’s release or Tv program’s broadcast, and accordingly they are often viewed as waste products and are disposed of on completion of a project; when they are retained, items held privately or by the studios are rarely made available for scholarly scrutiny.

Nyman donated the resource to the University of Leeds as an outcome of a joint Film and Music Conference held by the Universities of Leeds and

11 For example, Bernard Herrmann’s materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Max Steiner Collection at Brigham Young University, Utah; roy Webb’s scores at Syracuse University, New York; and the Warner Brothers’ Archives at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Huddersfield during the 2006 Bradford International Film Festival at the National Media Museum. He was the keynote speaker at the event and was interested to hear about the recent donation to the University of Leeds of around 400 session tapes and associated documentation by Trevor Jones, who was the featured composer at the first Film and Music Conference held in the previous year.12 Around 20 percent of the material in the Trevor Jones Archive was subsequently digitized as part of a small Arts & Humanities research Council (AHrC) research award, and this provided important insights into the technical and creative processes surrounding film-score production, particularly the developments which took place between the various spotting sessions and final mixdown.13 Nyman suggested that his material, which at that stage was held in a private storage facility, could offer researchers and students an equally valuable resource, and his generous offer was accepted by the University of Leeds Library. The audio tapes, hard drives, and related documentation are now retained in temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions.

A Source Model for Film Scoring in Mainstream Cinema

In our use of the term “mainstream” we are simultaneously referencing the commercial drivers, the aesthetic characteristics and the systems of production of films. Many of the pictures that Trevor Jones has scored (for which materials are held in the Jones Archive at Leeds) and that Nyman has scored since the end of his collaboration with Greenaway were written for a broad popular audience, produced by major companies and released into “first run” cinemas. They generally have had significant budgets with large casts led by high-profile actors, and technical crews which are strongly segmented by their production role. Underlying processes tend to be highly specified and carefully documented, and are usually (for commercial as much as technical reasons) very methodical and tightly managed. Discussion with Jones and a number of other film composers

12 Jones’s keynote interview is published in Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 1-14. He is the composer of a number of successful “mainstream” films such as The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Sea of Love, Arachnophobia, The Last of the Mohicans, Cliffhanger, In the Name of the Father, Brassed Off, Notting Hill and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.13 The application of this research to Jones’s score for Sea of Love (1989) is examined in the Authors’ chapter in Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 17-32; and to In the Name of the Father (1993) in David Cooper, “Trevor Jones’s Score for In the Name of the Father,” in Derek B. Scott, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 29-42.



Title Non-audio materials (all titles have audio materials)

A Zed and Two Noughts

Adidas Cue sheet

Albacete

Alice and Elsa Sonic solutions sheet

And Do They Do

Annabel and Dorothy

Andrex 2 cue sheets

Audi

British rail 2 cue sheets

Cadbury’s Whole Nut Cue sheet; AMPEX grand master audio mastering tape; performance uniformity chart

Carrington Spotting notes; cue sheet; notes; recording & mixing schedule; drawing of recording layout for ensemble

Child’s Play Cue sheet

Citizen Interiors Cue sheets

Coca Cola

The Cold Room

The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover Cue sheets

Dadarama 8 cue sheets

Death in the Seine Cue sheets; 6" floppy disk

The Diary of Anne Frank Eastcote Productions Producer’s and Engineer’s Cookbook (contains pitch ratios and BPM click tables, etc.); cue sheets; 3 pages of cues with timings/spotting sheets

The Draughtsman’s Contract Cue sheets; press cuttings; concert program

Drowning by Numbers Track listing sheets

Enemy Zero Cue sheets

Ericsson Cue sheets

Fairly Secret Army I & II Track sheet with details of musicians present at morning and afternoon recording sessions; cue sheets

Fall of Icarus 2 take listing sheets

Final Score 2 cue sheets; 4 hand-written A4 pages of takes with timings

Flying Lines

Gaudi vHS cassette

Gerolsteiner

Goodbye Frankie, Goodbye Benny Cue sheets

Guinness recording & mixing schedule

The Hairdressers’ Husband Cue sheets; lists of takes

Table 1. Film and Television Source Materials Held in the Michael Nyman Archive



Happiness

Harpsichord Concerto Full score

Hewlett Packard

Hybrid Kids

Il Palio Cue sheet

Italian Straw Hat

Jingles Cue sheets; list of takes; track sheets; notes on seating arrangement

Kingdom Come

The Kiss Cue sheet

La Sept

La Traversée de Paris

Lincoln Cars

London Brass

Lorca

Madrid

Making A Splash

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

The Masterwork

Memorial 6" floppy disk

Mesmer Cue sheet

Michael Nyman Band

Musique à Grand Vitesse Cue sheet

Miserere Cue sheet; timing information

Nestle Pet Foods Cue sheet

Not Mozart Cue sheet

Nuns 3 unlabelled 6" floppy disks; take lists

Nurofen recording & mixing schedule

The Ogre

Orpheus’ Dockter

Out of the Ruins

The Piano

The Princess of Milan Tape strip from mixing desk; effects settings; list of takes

Prospero’s Books Photographs

Rome Scene/music/action sheet

Russian Mass

Self Laudatory Hymn of Inanna & Her Omnipotence

Take lists



and orchestrators active in the UK has demonstrated the extent to which such long-established practices and supporting documentary source materials still underpin the film-scoring process (though they may be mediated in different ways by new technologies). These are illustrated in Table 2, below.

The theoretical source chain model we describe here follows the example of that presented by László Somfai in Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources.14 This model is particularly suitable for investigating film-scoring processes since it enables the inclusion of a broad range of source types—textual, visual, and aural—and is also sufficiently malleable to allow for the flexibility inherent in film-score composition. For Somfai, the generic source chain model for Bartók’s work incorporates eight source types and involves four discrete phases of activity:

the primary creative process•fixing and testing•editing•correcting (including the correction of errors, •and late revisions to the work).

In the model presented here, which is extended from the chronological description of standard scoring processes given by Karlin and Wright,15 we identify

14 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 28-32.15 Fred Karlin and rayburn Wright, On the Track (New York: Schirmer Books, 1990), 11.

twelve potential steps running from the composer’s first engagement with the film to its dubbing and release. There are naturally some activities which may postdate the cinematic release, such as the production of soundtrack albums, and the creation and performance of concert versions of cues, though we ignore these in this model on the grounds that the music serves a different function when detached from the film. Table 2, below, places the 12 potential steps derived from Karlin and Wright within the four phases of activity identified by Somfai, and provides examples of the range of source materials and types associated with each step.

The twelve steps involve various source types, including:

text;•symbolic encoding of music (whether in •conventional staff notation or as computer data for software such as Sibelius, Finale or Logic);graphical representations (for example of mixer •or outboard equipment settings); audio and video (which in both cases may be •analog or digital).

Individual links in the source chain may be missing, and some steps may be omitted or occur in a slightly varied order, but, as shown in Table 2, the entire process of score production can be loosely defined

Snarl Up

Son of Brid List

Song Book CD liner; written music

Splash

Strange Attractors

The Tempest Written music for “When the Bee Sucks,” “Before you Can Say,” “Full Fathom Five,” and “from L’Orgie Parisienne on Paris Se repeuple/rimbauld May 1871”; cue sheets; three 3.5" floppy disks

Touch the Earth

Toyota

Traversée

Trombone Concerto Full score

vanity Faire

Miscellaneous A large amount of as yet uncategorized press cuttings relating to Michael Nyman and his scores



as falling into four phases of activity (which may16 potentially overlap) in alignment with Somfai’s model:

an initial preparatory period including 1. technical groundwork and conceptualization; a primary creative period, including 2. composition and orchestration (adopting a broad definition of the latter term

16 Derived from Karlin and Wright through study of source materials from a mainstream score by Trevor Jones. See Authors’ chapter in Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 17-32.

encompassing such elements as the employment of electronic “toolkits” and the creation of demo recordings);editing and revision;3. recording and mixdown.4.

The apparent rigidity of the film-scoring process as outlined in Table 2 seems at odds with Nyman’s “freedom to create with as few restraints as possible” when composing music for Greenaway’s films. The following case study of The Draughtsman’s Contract

Phase Step Film-scoring process16 Source material Source type

1 1 Meeting filmmakers a)b)

Shooting scriptContract

TextText

2 Initial spotting (placement)

a)b)c)

Spotting notesTemp track“Locked picture”

TextAudiovideo

3 Planning a) Budgets and schedules Text

4 Timings and synchronization

a) Timing sheet Text

5 Conceptualizing a) Sketches Music/MIDI (audio)

2 6 Composing/programming

a)b)c)

DraftsShort scoresElectronic “toolkits”

Music/MIDI (audio)Music/MIDI (audio)Audio

7 recording a)

b)

Demos/“Gigastrated” mock ups (multitrack)Cue sheets

Audio (MIDI Music)

Text

3 8 Second spotting (demo) a)b)

Second spotting notesEdited cue sheets (from 7(b))

TextText

9 Composing (revisions/additions)

a)b)

DraftsShort scores

Music/MIDI (audio)Music/MIDI (audio)

10 Orchestration (unless purely electronic)

a)b)

Full scoreParts

MusicMusic

4 11 recording a)b)c)

d)

e)

f)

Takes (multitrack)Take cue sheetsMarked up/new parts/scoreOutboard equipment settingsMixdowns (multichannel stereo)Mixdown cue sheets

AudioTextMusic

Text/diagrams

Audio

Text

12 Editing/Dubbing a)b)

Sync pop placementTheatrical release

Textvideo and audio

Table 2: Generic Model of Scoring Processes and Sources



uses source materials to evaluate Nyman’s approach to film scoring, with particular regard to mainstream processes as outlined above.

The Draughtsman’s Contract

Set in 1694, shortly after the accession of the Protestant William of Orange to the throne of England as William III, the narrative concerns the Catholic Jacobite draughtsman Mr. Neville, who is commissioned by Mrs. Herbert, the mistress of Compton Anstey, to create 12 ink drawings of her country house and estate while her husband is absent on business. The contractual terms set by Neville include strict rules about access to the views he will draw and sexual liaisons with Mrs. Herbert as an element of the fee.

Political and religious animosity is engendered between Neville and Mrs. Herbert’s son-in-law, Mr. Talmann, a German Protestant who has designs on Compton Anstey, though his wife is childless and he has no heir. After Neville has completed six of the pictures, Mrs. Talmann confronts him with the allegation that they contain evidence of the death of her father, and could be taken to suggest that he was an accessory to murder. She offers Neville her protection through a parallel contract to that of her mother in which he will provide her with his sexual favours.

When the drawings are completed, Neville leaves and Mr. Herbert’s body is found in the lake. The Estate Manager, Mr. Noyes, blackmails Mrs. Herbert because of the contract (to which he was a witness), and the drawings are sold to Mr. Talmann in order to pay Noyes off. Neville returns to Compton Anstey with the desire to produce a thirteenth drawing—of the area where Mr. Herbert’s body was found—and in agreeing Mrs. Herbert offers him a final, non-contractual liaison. It is then revealed to Neville that he has been the victim of an elaborate stratagem of both Mrs. Herbert and her daughter to provide them with heirs. That night, Neville is blinded and killed by Noyes, Talmann, and an accomplice, and the drawings burnt.

It is a visually rich film with a sophisticated and highly literate screenplay that bristles with religious, political and sexual allusions. At once an erotic country-house murder mystery and historical drama, arguably it allegorically refers to the artist who blindly records but fails to comprehend. Appendix 4 of Peter Greenaway’s original proposal to the BFI outlines his initial ideas for the music for the film:

Enclosed in the last see-through envelope in this folder is a 45 rpm disc of a “transfigured” Mozart theme by Michael Nyman (Side A).

A music scheme being considered is to take twelve such original music themes by Purcell, Handel (to keep it English—if naturalised English) Lully or (to cheat a little on dates) Bach and Mozart, and “transfigure” them for “The Draughtsman’s Contract”—one theme for each drawing.

And use this presently recorded “transfigured” Mozart (remixed perhaps to minimise the horn) as an overal [sic] signature—for titles and credits and as ironic accompaniment for the long montage sequence called “reconnaissance” in the plan of the film.17

That a director should have such clearly formulated ideas for the music at this early stage of a film’s development (while still pitching for finance) is relatively unusual. Equally, his conception of the function and character of the “music scheme” (itself a revealing expression) was remarkably elaborate. Nyman’s transfiguration of Mozart in his In Re Don Giovanni (1977), a concert piece that draws on the first section of Leporello’s Act 1 “Catalogue” aria “Madamina, il catalogo è questo,” had obvious intertextual resonances with the draughtsman’s sexual liaisons with mother and daughter.18 More importantly, perhaps, it illustrated the malleability of Nyman’s music, which could offer Greenaway an expressive language that did not rely on close synchronization to image, and from which different length sequences could be extracted without adversely affecting their musical coherence. While the stylistic anachronism between the late-seventeenth-century narrative and late-eighteenth-century score (albeit reconfigured through the lens of the late twentieth century) apparently caused the Mozart to be rejected in favor of earlier (and English) sources, the underlying principle of art-music ground basses transformed by minimalist techniques became the guiding principle.

In an interview with Christopher Fox, Nyman outlined the process of composition of the score:

FOX: I’ve heard you say in interview that you wrote twice as much music as anybody else would have written for the film.

17 British Film Institute, The Draughtsman’s Contract (ND) http://www.bfi.org.uk/ greenaway/_dvd_bonus/ index.php?theme=2&type=Original%20Proposal&title=draughtsman [4 June 2009].18 In a Guardian interview, Nyman comments that Greenaway heard In Re Don Giovanni at a concert in 1977 and approached Nyman to work on his films as a result; The Draughtsman’s Contract is mentioned explicitly in this regard. The Draughtsman’s Contract, dir. Peter Greenaway (British Film Institute, 1982).

http://www.bfi.org.uk/greenaway/_dvd_bonus/index.php?theme=2&type=Original Proposal&title=draughtsman





NYMAN: Yes, but also a long time before the film was made… So the music was sitting around in a state of 75% completion for a year or so before he [Greenaway] started shooting […]

As the film starts, the first exterior that you see is the draughtsman’s assistant pushing sheep around, so I thought for the music we’d have the most basic version of this ground bass that wasn’t a real ground bass that I took from King Arthur or something. But in the meantime Peter had listened to the music not as a dictator of structure but just as a punter. He listened to the piece that we know as “Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds,” which is the most evolved of the six versions of this particular ground bass, and said, “This would be an amazing opening for a film.” We have the interior scene with the cocktail party and the singing, with the counter-tenor singing a Purcell-corrupted song, corrupted by me, and then all Peter’s filmmaking instincts suddenly came into play, you come out in the light and you whack the audience on the head with the most evolved version of the music for the first drawing. So structure goes completely out of the window in terms of the way the music is used and the kind of perception in the film.19

In Nyman’s approach in his work with Greenaway, “connotative value” is attached to large musical units rather than to discrete localized signifying gestures.20 While it may be possible to read particular iconic connections between music and images, any apparent close synchronization that emerges is largely fortuitous or the design of the director. So, for example, while an entire cue such as “Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds” may suggest swagger, arrogance, and pride in its organization of musical material, Nyman was not in a position to create any intentional localized relationships between score and film because of his collaborative working method with Greenaway. Musical material was cut to length in the edit suite, and thus there was no necessity to write cues to the exactitude of duration conventionally required by mainstream practice (as long as there was enough music in the first place). Spotting sessions would have been superfluous (and in conversation, Nyman has confirmed that indeed these did not take place), and timing sheets were therefore not generated.

Arguably Nyman’s role in the production process was similar to that of an art-music composer working to a conventional commission, and his comment that the majority of the score was completed before

19 Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 171-73.20 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 11.

shooting commenced reveals how different the approach was to that of mainstream film production, where the composer still tends to have relatively little input before post-production. In an interview conducted with Nyman by Ann Perego richards as part of an undergraduate music project at Kingston Polytechnic in the mid 1980s, he discussed both his overall approach and his relationship with Greenaway:

So if he gives me a basic outline of the film, I then go away…write the music according to that plan, allowing myself to be a composer rather than a film composer, so I have within the limits of the structure that he’s [Greenaway] set down and the sort of general overall function of the music. I just go away and write music as though [I’d] actually made those decisions to use that particular material, which of course I didn’t. You see, since I’m writing the music before he’s shot the film…while he’s shooting the film, while he’s editing the film independent of all these activities, the relationship is distant, because again what happens in a “normal” film is that the director has completed the film, he knows more or less precisely where he wants the music, and what kind of music he wants, therefore he comes to me and says cue one goes from here to here, so many seconds, has to do such. So with Peter we’re working in reverse order, since he hasn’t shot the film he can’t give instructions as to (a) the length of the material and (b) the mood, character qualities or whatever. So I just literally sat down with these instructions, with the material I’d selected…and wrote music, which satisfied me as a composer and which I would then give to Peter and he would use as a film-maker.21

Nyman’s account outlines some significant departures from mainstream scoring processes, more detail on which can be indentified through evidence drawn from the source materials in the Michael Nyman Archive as we discuss in the following section.

Evidence for the Process within the Michael Nyman Archive

The Michael Nyman Archive includes six tapes relating to The Draughtsman’s Contract: five 24-track, two-inch analog reels recorded for the film in February 1982 (see Table 3, below), and a 32-track DASH digital reel dated April 1992, ten years after the film’s release, which was recorded for the soundtrack album. Table 3 lists the information contained on the tape boxes and the associated tracksheets, and that is presented through spoken cue announcements on the tapes.

21 Appendix 2 of Ann Perego richards, “A Conceited view: A Study of The Draughtsman’s Contract,” Year 3 “Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Music,” BA Music Education, Kingston Polytechnic, n.d [c. 1984]. A copy of richards’s project is included within the Nyman archive.



Tape no. Reel no. Date Titles on boxes

Tracksheets Cue announcements

C7500707650 1 17/2/82 1&2, 3&5 Drawing 1 Day 1/2 0000 1.25Drawing 1 Day 3 0720 .56Drawing 1 Day 4 on front of reel. Edited out. 1180 .24Drawing 1 Day 5 3'28" 1400 1.50 False start 1465Drawing 2 Day 1 5'25" 2190 1.10Drawing 2 Day 2 2650Drawing 2 Day 3/4 3241Drawing 3 Day 1/2 3860Drawing 3 Day 3 4190Drawing 3 Day 7 4460Drawing 3 Day 8 4710

Drawing 1 Day 4

Drawing 1 Day 5

Drawing 2 Day 1 Drawing 2 Day 2

Drawing 2 Day 3

Drawing 3 Day 1

Drawing 3 Day 3

Drawing 3 Day 7

Drawing 3 Day 8

C7500707726 2 18/2/82 Drawing 5, return of Neville

Drawing 5 Day 12:58 Drawing 5 Day 2 13104:08 return of Neville Part 1 1840 Part 2 2350Drawing 6 Day 1 3167-3663 .55Drawing 6 Day 2 3505 1.06Drawing 6 day 4 3870 5 /1 5 /21.11Drawing 5 Day 4 4245 NB: END TUNE DELETE 1ST TIME COPY 2ND 2.40 spare tape [?] end of reel

The return of Neville

Drawing 6 Day 1

Drawing 6 Day 4

Drawing 5 Day 4

Table 3: The Five Analog Multitrack Tapes and their Contents



In Table 4 the sources of Nyman’s transformations of music, and in particular the ground basses by Purcell and Croft, are cross-referenced with the track titles from the soundtrack recording and the cue titles on tape and in the documentation.

Nyman has described how the individual drawings each had an associated ground bass and that, as a structural conceit, they were originally intended to appear in increasingly complex versions which mirrored the draughtsman’s artistic process and progress. In a program note for a concert performance of the score at St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, in February 1983, he states that:

The initial plan for the score was to assign a different ground bass to each of two sets of six drawings (to help with the “reading” of each of Neville’s designated viewpoints) and allows each piece to grow and develop as each drawing progressed over the six days. This fine plan was shot to pieces by the

C7500707922 3 19/2/82 Herbert,

Queen of the Night,

[Drawing 3] Day 3

Death of Herbert

A1 B1 B2 A2 C 0000 0188 640 1115 1247

Queen of the Night1714 2260-2800 2950 – endDAY 33750 DrAWING 3

The Death of Herbert. . . part B. . . B2. . . A2. . . CQueen of the Night

C7500707651 4 20/2/82 Drawing 6 Drawing 6 Day 5 0000 1100 1600Queen of the Night vocal Part 1 + Part 22500 + Drawing 4 2nd setThe “other” song 3450A more positive, er, track list for, er, Drawing 5 6 [sic]4160

Drawing 6 Day 5

Queen of the Night - Mistakes version

C7500707649 5 21/2/82 Death of Neville

Death of Neville 6:08 8:42A B C0000

Part 1 [sic]Section C [sic]Part C

practicalities of film length, the editing process and the invariable problems of balancing the demands of dialogue, sound effects and music: so that some of the music prepared was not composed, some composed and not recorded, some recorded and not used, some used only in part.22

The essence of the musical scheme Nyman describes here matches that which Greenaway included in his original proposal to the BFI (see above), yet it was Greenaway who decided to dissolve this strategy once filming was complete and he came to combine Nyman’s music with the images. In an interview with Alan Woods, Greenaway says that:

22 Michael Nyman, “The English Premiere of the Complete Score of Michael Nyman’s Soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract Performed by the Michael Nyman Band.” Unpublished document housed in the Michael Nyman Archive, University of Leeds (1983), 4.



[I]n the early days with Michael [Nyman]…we tried to find an equivalence of image and music to move23 towards a useful collaboration—not just a music-servicing relationship—so that music was essentially structural. I think The Draughtsman’s Contract proves the potentiality of that, the music and the images are often equally complementary.24

Greenaway’s primary concern was clearly that the music and images would complement each other, and it would seem that this aim overrode any other scheme by which the music had been written. It is possible that he felt a strict matching of ever-more progressive cues, and drawings would, paradoxically, relegate the score to a mere supporting role (something he was clearly keen to avoid), though since Greenaway does not elucidate further on the score to Draughtsman, this is only supposition. Table 5 lists the basic cues in the order they appear in the film, and demonstrates how the original scheme was “shot

23 For further details regarding the sources for Nyman’s score see ap Siôn, The Music of Michael Nyman, 85.24 Alan Woods, Being Naked, Playing Dead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 275.

to pieces” in the released version of the film. In the interview conducted by richards, Nyman discusses one of the specific omissions from the score and the fortuitous nature of the result:

[I]n the very final sequence in the garden at night, the death, the murder, you hear the beginning of “The Death of Neville” and that piece was actually designed to last the whole length of that sequence. Now since I wrote it before he’d shot that sequence or edited that sequence, the musical changes that occur in that piece…were decisions I’d made independently of the film, but I assumed that this whole piece of music would go through it. And it was found that the music was sort of too heavy and too portentous and took away from the dialogue…

So you hear only the “book ends” and so the interesting thing to me is that since it was composed as a continuous piece of music. You know the second section arose because I’d written the first, and the third section because I’d composed the second and in fact I couldn’t have the third section, which is the section with the burning of the drawings, I couldn’t have written that unless I’d written the beginning. So it was useful to me, and essential to me as a composer rather than a film composer, to write the piece continuously. And it so happened that this great sudden change that I brought into the music at the beginning of the

Nyman cue title Soundtrack title Source23

“Queen of the Night” “Queen of the Night” Purcell, “So when the glitt’ring Queen of Night,” The Yorkshire Feast Song

“Drawing 1” “Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds”

Purcell, King Arthur, Act III scene 2, Prelude

“Drawing 3” “The Disposition of the Linen”

Purcell, Secular Song, Z413, “She loves and she confesses too”

“Drawing 5” “An Eye for Optical Theory” Ground C minor (D221) (attr. William Croft)

“Drawing 6” “The Garden is Become a robe room”

Purcell, “Here the deities approve” Welcome to all the Pleasures (Ode)/E minor Ground, Henry Playford: Musick’s Handmaid (Second Part)

“Death of Herbert,” Section C

“A Watery Death” (second part, from 1' 45")—first part of “A Watery Death” is “return of Neville”

Purcell, Chaconne in G minor for keyboard ZT680 (arrangement of the “Curtain Tune on a Ground” from Timon of Athens, Z632)

“Death of Neville” “Bravura in the Face of Grief”

“The Plaint,” The Fairy Queen, Act v

Table 4: Cues in The Draughtsman’s Contract and their Sources



third section, where the ground bass becomes the melody and it’s harmonized differently and you get the harpsichord. And Peter heard that harpsichord music and thought it would be ideal for the fire. And looking at it you think “God, how did the composer and the film-maker come up with this brilliant combination of visual and musical imagery?” Where I have to say we didn’t. It was pure luck that that harpsichord was there.25

Since the musical cues for The Draughtsman’s Contract were composed neither to fit a tightly defined timing scheme, nor a final set of visual images, there are many such fortuitous combinations that can be found in this film and throughout the Greenaway–Nyman collaborations.

Table 5: Cues Used in A Draughtsman’s Contract in Running Order. Italics delineate the various cycles or par-tial cycles of cues.

Cue Name

1 Queen of the Night

2 Drawing 1

3 Drawing 2

4 Drawing 3

5 Queen of the Night with Mistakes

6 Drawing 5

7 Drawing 6

8 Drawing 1

9 Drawing 2

10 Drawing 3

11 Drawing 5

12 Drawing 6

13 Drawing 1

14 Drawing 2

15 Drawing 3

16 Drawing 1

17 Drawing 5

18 Drawing 6

19 Drawing 1

20 Drawing 6

25 richards, “A Conceited view,” Appendix 2.

21 Drawing 1

22 Drawing 6

23 Death of Neville Section B (sax)

24 Drawing 3

25 Drawing 6

26 Death of Herbert Section A (twice)

27 Death of Herbert Section C

28 Death of Neville (sax)

29 return of Neville

30 Death of Neville

32 Drawing 1 (closing credits)

Given Nyman and Greenaway’s unusual working relationship, and the truncation of the film to less than half its original planned length, it is perhaps unsurprising that material was recorded and included in the tapes listed above but not used in the final cut of the film. Attention has already been drawn to the truncation of the cue “The Death of Neville,” a complete version of which appears on the soundtrack album. There are, however, several other examples of sections of cues that were recorded but neither dubbed onto the film nor issued on the soundtrack album. Perhaps the most striking of these is found in the “B section” of “The Death of Herbert,” whose slurred couplets have a rather different musical “feel” to much of the rest of the score (see Example 1, below, for the fundamental melodic material underlying the music).

It is arguable that the multitrack tapes held in the Nyman Archive constitute rather more than the simple realization of a score to be mixed down to a set of film stereo (left-centre-right) music tracks. They can also be considered as holding a role that is equivalent to the audio “toolkits” that Trevor Jones employed as a resource for the director, allowing the combination of individual tracks at will.26 Thus we find that the solo soprano saxophone track from the cue “Death of Neville” (played by John Harle) is extracted and used to form the twenty-third and twenty-eighth cues. Equally, an ingredient that is missing from all the mixes is the drum machine rhythm that is recorded on track 1 and underpins all the multitrack recordings. Arguably the rhythmic edge of the music results from the presence and absence of this rhythmic component (which the performers used as both click and guide track).

26 For further insight into the use of toolkits in scores by Trevor Jones, see Authors’ chapter in Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 17-32.



Conclusions

As will have become apparent, the creative approach taken by Nyman and Greenaway was fundamentally different from that of mainstream practice, and this is reflected in the source materials that are held in the archive. Although there were arguably three phases in the score’s development (phase 2 from the above model is omitted owing to the nature of the Nyman/Greenaway working relationship and the relative independence of the creation of the music and the visual film), there are two focal points. In pre-production Nyman was given very considerable freedom to act as a “composer” rather than as a “film composer” (using his own terms) through his complete independence from the visual component,

and in post-production Greenaway took the lead, selecting and reordering the elements (see Table 6).

Nyman clearly enjoyed his artistic relationship with Greenaway, as indicated by the comments cited at the beginning of this article, and he went on to score a sequence of further films for him. However, their partnership broke down after Prospero’s Books partly, perhaps, as a result of the artistic autonomy of the two individuals. Nyman remarks that:

[W]hen I saw the film [Prospero’s Books] I realised that all the artistic agreements that we had made had gone by the board. Again he perceived the music differently because the film had changed, and my beautifully crafted soundtrack was hedged around with some rather juvenile student electronics that no-one had

Example 1: “The Death of Herbert Section B,” Soprano Saxophone Melody

Phase Step Film-scoring process (Michael Nyman: The Draughtsman’s Contract)

Source material Source type

1 1 Meeting filmmaker Shooting scriptContract

TextText

3 Planning Budgets and schedules Text

5 Conceptualizing Sketches Music

6 Composing DraftsShort scores

MusicMusic

10 Orchestration/realization Parts Music

10a Feedback from Greenaway on final film shape

3 11 recording Takes (multitrack)Take cue sheets

AudioText

4 12 Editing/Dubbing Theatrical release video and audio

Table 6: Adaptation of the Source-Chain Model to Nyman and Greenaway’s Approach in The Draughtsman’s Contract



warned me about. It’s kind of strange, there’s a large element of the unknown—you present the score to the director, you don’t know where it’s going to appear, how it’s going to appear, what the mix is going to be like—but if there’s an added element that is a lot closer to music than to sound effects, you might think that the director would actually have the consideration to let the composer know, especially a director who had been a personal friend for thirty years.27

While it is clear that in some regards the unconventional working patterns of Nyman and Greenaway enabled the composer to work “in precisely the same way [he does] when writing [his] ‘concert music’,” the evidence drawn from the session recordings and other documentation for The Draughtsman’s Contract show that, once recording was finished, Nyman was left with even less control over the use of his material than a composer working within the mainstream scoring process.28 The above quote reinforces this seemingly paradoxical situation, whereby increased autonomy at the outset leads to near total musical impotence when the score and images are finally combined.

We believe that the Michael Nyman Archive provides a valuable resource for tracing and evaluating further the interactions between the composer and the directors he has worked with, both within non-mainstream and mainstream cinematic contexts, and that film-score sources such as those employed in this study help to elucidate the ways in which the place of music changes and develops through the entire production process.

27 Cooper et al., CineMusic?, 174-75.28 Nyman, “The English Premiere,” 4.

references

ap Siôn, Pwyll. 2007. The music of Michael Nyman: Texts, contexts and intertexts. Farnham: Ashgate.

British Film Institute. n.d. The Draughtsman’s Contract. http://www.bfi.org.uk/greenaway/_dvd_bonus/index.php?theme=2&type=Original%20Proposal&title=draughtsman> [4 June 2009].

Burnand, David. 2006. Scoring This Filthy Earth. In European film music, ed. David Burnand and Miguel Mera. Aldershot: Ashgate, 178-90.

Cooper, David. 2009. Trevor Jones’s score for In the Name of the Father. In The Ashgate research companion to popular musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott. Farnham: Ashgate, 29-42.

Cooper, David, Christopher Fox, and Ian Sapiro, eds. 2008. CineMusic? Constructing the film score. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Eco, Umberto. 1976. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Greenaway, Peter, dir. 1982. The Draughtsman’s Contract. British Film Institute.

Karlin, Fred and rayburn Wright. 1990. On the track. New York: Schirmer Books.

Mera, Miguel. 2007. Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm: A film score guide. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Nyman, Michael. 1974. Experimental music: Cage and beyond, 1st edn. London: Studio vista.

———. 1982. Session recordings from The Draughtsman’s Contract. Michael Nyman Archive, University of Leeds.

———. 1983. The English premiere of the complete score of Michael Nyman’s soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract performed by the Michael Nyman Band. Unpublished document housed in the Michael Nyman Archive, University of Leeds.

———. 1999. Experimental music: Cage and beyond, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

richards, Ann Perego. n.d [c. 1984]. A conceited view: A study of The Draughtsman’s Contract. Unpublished dissertation, Kingston Polytechnic.

Somfai, László. 1996. Béla Bartók: Composition, concepts, and autograph sources. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Woods, Alan. 1996. Being naked, playing dead: The art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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a source-studies approach to michael nyman's score

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