Michael Nyman | Bentham & Hooker

Michael Nyman

Bentham & Hooker

Cullompton, Devon : Beau Geste Press, 1973

[106] pp,  15 cm., softcover

Edition of 100

Michael Nyman is best known for the multi-platinum selling soundtrack to Jane Campion's award winning 1993 film The Piano. Before that he was the celebrated composer of scores for over a decade of Peter Greenaway feature films: The Draughtsman's Contract (1982),  A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and Prospero's Books (1991)1. 

Prior to this he was known as a music critic. His 1968 article in The Spectator magazine about Cornelius Cardew is the first published work to use the term "minimalism" in relation to music. His 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond explored the influence of John Cage on contemporary music and visual art (an entire chapter is dedicated to Fluxus, for example). 

In 1976 he released his first recording, Decay Music, on Brian Eno's short-lived by highly influential Obscure Records2. Considered a compositional breakthrough for Nyman, Decay Music was a kind of conceptual exercise borrowed from Morton Feldmann. One hundred piano chords are played - from the top of the piano to the bottom - and the performer can only play the next chord when the first has stopped ringing out. 

Bentham & Hooker arrived three years prior, and this biographical preamble is precisely because I can find absolutely no information about the title. 

The auction site offering it for sale (along with two other Beau Geste Press titles) lists only the following sentence: Mimeographed poetic experiment by the composer and music critic. 

Bentham & Hooker is a taxonomic system for seed plants, dating back to the mid-19th century. The British botanists George Bentham (1800–1884) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) developed the system based on the principle of natural affinities. As it predates Darwinism,  it does not take evolution into account. 

It's easy to see how Nyman's interest in process and minimalism could collide in a work inspired by the Bentham & Hooker system. 

I once mentioned an Aphex Twin work that I couldn't confirm the existence of and Robin Rimbaud (who produces work under the name of Scanner) reached out with both information and images. If anyone can provide the same for this Nyman title produced in such a small edition size - fifty years ago! - I'd be grateful. 

1. Nyman was unavailable to score Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect in 1987, so Wim Mertens (whose 1983 book on Minimalism featured a forward by Nyman) took over, with a soundtrack of very Nyman-esque music. 

2. The series of ten Obscure Records also featured classics like Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic (b/w with another classic: Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet), Eno's best ambient work Discreet Music, the debut LP from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, as well as discs by Harold Budd, John Cage, David Toop and others.