ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Michael Nyman's early work against the backdrop of the experimental scene in the 1970s in order to show how his experiences in a variety of music-related areas formed the basis for the pluralist, postmodern and inherently intertextual approach adopted by him from the mid-1970s onwards. At one point during Nyman's TV-opera homage to Mozart, Letters, Riddles and Writs, an eighteenth-century style mock courtroom scene is held where the composer is brought to trial for committing 'blatant intellectual theft'. Nyman's use of musical quotation may therefore be more easily understood and accurately explained from the perspective of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century compositional practice. If Nyman's musical-textual critiques resemble that of structuralism, he nevertheless turns the text's autonomy on its head by using a found object – a musical intertext — as his material, suggesting that an important post-structural element also forms part of his musical aesthetic.
