Born in London in 1944, Michael Nyman is one of the most prolific and versatile composers and keyboardists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He studied at King's College London and at the Royal Academy of Music, focusing on Baroque, but by the late 1960s he was moving toward contemporary music, writing the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle’s 1969 opera Down by the Greenwood Side. As he developed as a composer and performer, Nyman also worked as a musicologist, coining the term minimalism—of which he was an adherent—in 1968 and writing the influential 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. He formed an electric chamber ensemble to perform his own music in 1976, the same year he made the solo piano recording Decay Music, which was produced and released by Brian Eno on his Obscure Records imprint. During the 1970s, Nyman was also a key figure of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which embraced the participation of nonmusicians in its performances. Nyman has scored countless films, including Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and the 1993 Jane Campion movie The Piano, in addition to composing dozens of works for chamber ensembles, orchestra, string quartets, and soloists.