Michael Nyman, born 23.3.1944 in London, first became known for his unusual music for the films of Peter Greenaway. His music is founded in the rejection of contemporary music that he found. It was only his encounter with the American pioneers of minimal music that led Nyman back to music; in contrast to their model-free, precisely controlled systems of form, he took the Western musical tradition as a starting point for his less constrained compositions in order to create explicitly "beautiful" music. Nyman became known primarily through Jane Campion's film "The Piano".