When Michael Nyman published his study Experimental Music: John Cage and Beyond (1974), he could hardly have foreseen his own contribution to that "beyond". Rejecting the orthodoxies of British modernism, Nyman had abandoned composition in 1964, working instead as a musicologist, editing Purcell and Handel, and collecting folk music in Romania. Later he became a music critic, in which capacity he was the first to apply the word "minimalism" to music, in a 1968 review for the Spectator of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Digest.

That same year, a chance encounter with a BBC broadcast of Steve Reich's Come Out opened his ears to further possibilities. A route back to composition was emerging. He wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's 1969 "dramatic pastoral" Down by the Greenwood Side. In 1977, Birtwistle, by now Musical Director of the National Theatre, commissioned him to provide arrangements of 18th-century Venetian songs for the production of Carlo Goldoni's play Il Campiello, to be performed by what Nyman describes as "the loudest street band" he could imagine: rebecs, sackbuts, shawms alongside banjo, bass drum and saxophone.

Thrilled by the results, Nyman kept the Campiello Band together, now propelled by his own piano-playing. But a band needs repertoire, which Nyman set about providing, beginning with In Re Don Giovanni, a characteristic treatment of a 16-bar sequence by Mozart. Soon the band's line-up mutated, amplification was added, and the name changed to the Michael Nyman Band. This has been the laboratory in which Nyman has formulated his aesthetic, its soundworld shaping a compositional style built around strong melodies, flexible, assertive rhythms and precisely articulated ensemble playing.

Besides concert-hall works, Nyman has written dozens of film scores for directors as diverse as Peter Greenaway, Jane Campion and Volker Schlöndorff; and pieces to accompany dance, a catwalk fashion show (Yamamoto Perpetuo for Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto), the opening of a high-speed rail link (MGV, 1993) and a computer game (Enemy Zero). That acute sensitivity to occasion and context is enriched by a talent, shared with baroque composers, for refiguration: the 1995 Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings develops ideas previously encountered in The Convertibility of Lute Strings and Tango for Tim; the Third String Quartet lies behind the score for Christopher Hampton's 1996 movie Carrington. At every turn Nyman has proved eminently practical. Not for him the ivory tower anguish of a tormented composer grappling with abstract systems, rather an openness to collaboration, a spry sense of humour, a highly literate imagination and an instant, instinctive ability to engage a highly diverse audience.

Michael Nyman's recent commissions have included the Cycle of Disquietude song cycle for the One Hundred Days Festival in Lisbon; Strong on Oaks, Strong on the Causes of Oaks for the English Sinfonia and the soundtrack for Gattaca, directed by Andrew Nicol. His new opera, Facing Goya will be premiered in Autumn 1999 at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.