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The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts.

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The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts. By Pwyll ap Sion. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. [xviii, 232 p. ISBN-13: 9781859282106. $99.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographical references, index.

The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts is the first book-length publication on any British experimentalist since Michael Nyman's own Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (2d ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; first edition, London: Studio Vista, 1974). For that reason alone, it is welcome: the British musical establishment has not exactly embraced British experimental ism and its associated postmodernism. America eventually celebrated its own experimentalism and minimalism, especially from Ives to Cage, and from Young and Riley to its own "post-minimalists," as part of American studies. Thus, although there are experts in American experimentalism working in British universities, there are no full-time specialists in British experimental music, bar Keith Potter (whose major work centers on American minimalism). In fact, experimental music has not always been accepted in Britain as music; although Schirmer Music published Experimental Music in the United States in 1974, its first British publisher, as noted above, was the visual arts firm Studio Vista.

Michael Nyman came to his own post-minimal style through a wide range of experiences. He studied composition with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music, but disillusioned with the composition styles prevalent at the time, studied musicology with Thurston Dart at King's College, London, where he specialized in seventeenth-century music. In the late 1960s, Nyman built a...

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