Michael Laurence Nyman - Drowning by Numbers

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944) is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano.

Nyman has stated his preference for writing opera to other sorts of music. His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, Love Counts, and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist.

Drowning by Numbers is a 1988 British film directed by Peter Greenaway. It was
entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. The film's plot centers on three women — a grandmother, mother and daughter — each named Cissie Colpitts. As the story progresses each woman successively drowns her husband. The three Cissie Colpitts are played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson.

The musical score by Michael Nyman is at Greenaway's specific request, entirely based on themes taken from the slow movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, K364, bars 58-61 of which are heard in their original form immediately after each drowning. Nyman was alerted to the potential of this piece by Greenaway in the late 1970s and had previously used it as material for part of the score for Greenaway's The Falls and for "The Masterwork" Award Winning Fish-Knife and Tristram Shandy.

The album is the tenth by Nyman, and the seventh to feature the Michael Nyman Band.

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