This chapter sets out by asking whether a distinct musical aesthetic exists for art house, indie, and European cinema by examining composer Michael Nyman’s collaborations with experimental film director Peter Greenaway between 1976–91.

Despite music’s more elevated status in avant-garde cinema, scholars have largely avoided discussing its function within these films in any detail. Starting by situating Nyman’s compositional practice in relation to more recent explorations into film territory as composer-turned-auteur, the chapter traces a journey in the Nyman-Greenaway soundtracks from the “structuralist-objective” stance adopted in the early, experimental non-narrative A Walk Through H (1978), through more “structuralist-subjective” and “expressive-objective” approaches in The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Drowning by Numbers (1988), to a kind of “expressive subjectivity” encountered in The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989).

The process-based design of A Walk Through H is reflected in Nyman’s soundtrack, which makes use of minimalist structures and musical systems. In The Draughtsman’s Contract, Nyman’s music parallels Mr. Neville’s paintings and their locations, but on one of the concluding scenes it is employed for its more expressive potential. Music’s emotional power is utilized still further in Drowning by Numbers, which nevertheless keeps its distance from the characters through the self-reflexive use of number games and other structuring devices, while the music in The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover is used to provoke shockingly strong emotional responses.

The chapter concludes by arguing that in art cinema music has reasserted itself within the traditional understanding of the sound-image relationship—shifting from background to foreground, and thus forming an equal partner in a relationship that is at once divided while remaining coherent.