Michael Nyman: Musical passages from India

Michael Nyman has come out from behind the film screens. The composer tells Nick Kimberley about his work with Indian musicians – and asks why his opera Facing Goya is still unseen here in the UK

Some composers demand ivory-tower isolation, others prefer the hurly-burly of collaboration. Michael Nyman falls into the latter category. He has written his share of concertos, string quartets and songs, but some of his most characteristic music has emerged in more collaborative forms: dance, opera and, most famously, cinema.

Although Nyman insists he is not a "film composer" as such, his work in the movies has found his widest audience, whether through his 15-year collaboration with Peter Greenaway, or in projects such as Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997). At its best, Nyman's film music does not simply underline moments of emotional crisis, it structures the narrative and how we respond to it.

His latest collaboration is quite different. Sangam: The Meeting Point brings together Nyman and three Indian musicians: the singers Rajan and Sajan Misra, and the virtuoso mandolinist U Shrinivas. In December 2000, under the auspices of the Asian Music Circuit, Nyman travelled to India, where he struck up creative relationships with the Misras and U Shrinivas. All then met up at Fabrica, the Benetton-funded arts "factory" in Italy, where they workshopped their ideas. Sangam, out now on CD from Warner Classics, is the result.

As Nyman recalls: "It was a challenge to work with musicians who came from a compositional system that was fixed but nevertheless allowed them to be creative, and that has certainly been knocking around longer than the system to which I subscribe, which is tonal harmony. Their music is not simply about self-expression; it's about approaching the deity, or whatever word you want to use. That plays no part in what I do, so collaborating with them was a process of instant secularisation. And their musical system is monophonic; there is no harmony. Yet here they were meeting a musician for whom harmony is the lifeblood. That was another paradox: do I become a monophonic composer, or do I try to force their music to become harmonic? In a way I've done both."

With the Misras, Nyman's own band produces something akin to the drone that is at the heart of much Indian music. With Shrinivas, Nyman's music is jumpier, jazzier, more minimalist. In both cases, there is a perhaps unexpected reticence in Nyman's contribution, which acknowledges that his collaborators demanded different responses. "The material I wrote for Rajan and Sajan approaches closer the unbroken flow that we think of when we think of Indian music. They presented me with three compositions, which I had to find a way of 'Nymanising' without destroying or effacing their work.

"Shrinivas has played with John McLaughlin's group Shakti and is more used to working with Western musicians. That made possible something semi-improvisational, where we feed off each other, so I've written a choppy, chopped-up montage, dealing with time, form and structure in a way that is cyclical, although not in the Indian sense. Too often it's the Western artist who gains most from this kind of project, while the non-Western artist becomes a provider. I've been punctilious about acknowledging the equivalence of their work and mine. In the matter of publishing royalties, we are equals. They are creative artists as well as performers, and that was the only way I could justify working with them."

The experience has coloured the music he has written since, and Nyman is contemplating a touring duo of himself at the piano and U Shrinivas on the mandolin. For the moment, though, he is preoccupied with operatic projects. His most recent opera, Facing Goya, premiered in Spain in 2000, still awaits its British debut. Nyman describes it as "a gargantuan conglomeration of subject matter", its themes giving it an urgency rarein contemporary opera: eugenics, cloning, the attempt to find a biological basis for artistic genius, all tied together by the search for Francisco de Goya's missing skull.

Nyman regards it as "the best work I've done". It irks him that, despite a dearth of successful new British opera, it remains unseen here. "In this country, nobody busts a gut to commission new opera, but this is by a British composer, and its subject matter is unusually pertinent to how we live our lives now, and are going to live them over the next 10 years. That's no guarantee of it being good or important, but I find it strange that no British producer has jumped at the chance to stage it."

For Nyman, Germany seems more welcoming. He is composer-in-residence to the opera house in Karlsruhe, where Facing Goya had its German premiere last autumn. In 2004, Karlsruhe will premiere his next opera, Man and Boy: Dada, a work less encyclopaedic than Facing Goya, but perhaps more deeply personal. "As a kid," Nyman recalls, "I used to collect bus tickets. A couple of years ago, I saw a Kurt Schwitters retrospective in Hanover, and realised that, wherever he lived, he used local bus tickets in his collages. When he lived in London, he used tickets from routes 24, 31 and so on: the same tickets I was collecting a few years later. So the ideas started rubbing together, and Michael Hastings has written me a libretto about Schwitters and a young boy competing for bus tickets. In the process it's also about Schwitters, the artist in exile, having lost not only his archive of his own work, but also his wife, now passing on his experiences to the young boy. It's more linear and conversational than Facing Goya, and accordingly my music is more lyrical and continuous. I suppose that, subconsciously, I'm making operas that are as cinematic as possible, but which allow me to get away from the conventions of film music. In effect opera, the largest-scale narrative form that I can work in, is my feature film."

'Sangam: The Meeting Point' is part of the HSBC Indo British Award Concert, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020-7960 4242) tonight at 7.30pm