ABSTRACT
Spanning a period of ten years from the completion of his first string quartet in 1985, Nyman's compositions in this medium form a comprehensive inventory of intertextual techniques that include quotation, appropriation, revision and re-composition. Nyman's musical borrowings when played by his band often drew attention to an inherent paradox between the material and its form: the musical material would suggest 'the past', but its form how it sounded belonged to 'the present'. John Bull's use of a rigid eight-bar template for all thirty variations allows Nyman to identify, isolate and endlessly reshape and repeat pre-existing material. Nyman shares with other minimalist composers (La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass) a fascination with South Indian classical music. Intertextual elements thus appear in a variety of different guises in Nyman's string quartets, from the use of multiple referential quotation, generic and formal appropriation to self-quotation, translation, re-composition and addition.
