In this concert devoted to “Music from and for Film” Nyman was without his lively band to put some colourful timbral flesh on his music’s minimalist bones. There was just a piano and a 1960s fleapit cinema-sized small screen.
Appropriate, given the quality of Nyman’s own home movies. We saw one brilliant short film: À propos de Nice, Jean Vigo’s dazzling 1930 mixture of cinema vérité and surrealism.
But whatever Vigo’s immediate subject – old men playing boules, magical transformations, dancing girls showing their knickers – Nyman’s dreary music plodded on regardless without any obvious consonance with or illumination of the image.
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His own films showed minimal visual flair and a gratingly arch sense of humour. In No Bull we see a bull ring prepared for a fight but not the fight itself. In Berlin Lobbyists we watch people (presumably in Berlin) sitting in a lobby – lobbyists, get it?
These might have been redeemed by some witty, allusive or even varied music but Nyman’s musical palette was a drab one of few chords, plodding rhythms and little dynamic range.
At least a bit of his lyrical folksy score for The Piano was heard during A History of Cinema Part 67. Nyman’s efforts might be dismissed as Islington intelligentsia twaddle. I was inspired.
I’ve dusted off my Yamaha keyboard, grabbed a camcorder and I’m off to create my own movie-and-music show called Money for Old Rope.