Politics & Power Quote by Michael Nyman

Nyman’s complaint lands with the weary precision of someone who knows exactly how film music gets laundered through committee taste. He concedes, almost grudgingly, that the score had “inherent problems” and could have been “overcome” with remixing. That small admission is a strategic downbeat: he’s not pretending the work was flawless. He’s establishing credibility before delivering the real indictment - not of the notes, but of the brief.

The twin questions - “why did they ask me” and “why did Griffin ask me to do it this way” - read like a composer clocking the quiet absurdity of being hired for a signature sound, then instructed to ventriloquize a different cultural idiom. “American vernacular” isn’t just a musical style here; it’s a shorthand for a whole set of expected signifiers (rootsy textures, rhythmic directness, pop-coded familiarity) that can be pasted onto a film to make it legible to a market. Nyman’s irritation is less about America than about mismatch: the music is being asked to perform nationality, to supply a borrowed accent for a film whose story and atmosphere don’t “have” that DNA.

Contextually, it’s a snapshot of late-20th-century scoring politics: the composer as brand, the director or producer as translator, the soundtrack as a tool for smoothing over a film’s perceived foreignness or strangeness. The subtext is pointed: if the goal is merely to retrofit cultural flavor, the artist becomes a technician, and the score becomes packaging.