If the music of Michael Nyman can be criticised for relying too heavily on a comfortable Western tonalism, then it can also be praised for the same. His prospectus, in building his music on the Classicist European symphonic canon in which he was trained, is quite unusual in New Music, which is about pushing boundaries. But it is in a sense wholly honest and coherent. He does not dissect away some part of African or Indian music and slot it into Western music. Though I do not criticise those who do - and I love Glass and Reich - I think that his minimalism is in that respect more cogent, if less ground-breaking. Western music has always been enriched from its frontiers; indeed, Brahms and Bartók did that. But it also needs to revise itself from within, in an elemental way, and Nyman has been contributing to that for decades.
Nyman's very occidental minimalism is by its nature introspective, and that is valuable. Apparently, he found his musical style when he played Don Giovanni's catalogue aria in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis. There is something powerful in that: taking Mozart's Don Giovanni - the work that Kierkegaard said was "of total perfection" - and bending it through rock and roll, which is just as tall a totem of Western culture.
In Re Don Giovanni - Introspective Western Music
The illustration is a quick one, in Indian ink and watercolour, that I did based on a photograph I saw.
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