Michael Nyman was 60 on March 23. As he is one of contemporary music’s most well-known, popular and commercially successful artists, the industry is marking the event with some recycled classics.

The Signum disc is a reissue of recordings made 10 years ago and released on Work Music as ‘Taking a Line For a Second Walk’, without the two untitled pieces. Taking a Line derives from a commission for the Houston Ballet Orchestra. As a piano duet it was first published in a longer version then withdrawn. The Water Dances and Red Hat were written for Peter Greenaway’s films, Making a Splash and A Zed and Two Noughts.

The Dances suffer from the absence of the textures and most of the colours of the ensemble score, but the phrasing, cadences and rhythmic patterns remain unmistakably Nyman’s and they still come across as among the most sensual of his works. The untitled compositions make good companion pieces to Taking a Line, alternating quiet, flowing passages with stabbing chords.

The most interesting of the Virgin discs is ‘Decay Music’, originally released in 1976 on Obscure Records, minus Faster Decay. 1-100 was composed for yet another Greenaway film about numbers. Greenaway wanted a musical parallel to the film’s structure, so Nyman devised a series of 100 chords. Each section represented 10 numbers and concentrated on specific chord types. Starting high, it moves towards the bass, the spaces between the chords dictated by the length of decay of the sound. Four recordings were superimposed and Nyman was intrigued by how precisely specified methods could still lead to unexpected events, like accidental concurrences and staggered sonorities. The organic method of using natural decay times and the consequent moments of near-silence suggest something by Morton Feldman, which is fine by me. Bell Set also exploits decay times, but in a pre-determined fashion. If you only know Nyman’s film music, or his later concert music, this is an ear-opener.

While ‘Decay Music’ was the first recording of Nyman’s music to be released, an album by his band had to wait another five years: ‘Michael Nyman’ (Piano Records) contained some of his most exhilarating pieces, including In Re Don Giovanni and Bird List Song. It was my introduction to Nyman’s work and, frankly, I’d rather that it was reissued (or re-recorded) than resources spent on repackaging albums that have been in the catalogue more often than not. Maybe I should be grate-ful, as the collectors’ value of my vinyl copy remains unthreatened.

Greenaway is the misanthrope’s misanthrope, and the fresh air one craves when watching his films is usually provided by Nyman’s music. The Draughtsman’s Contract was cut to fit the music, and the plotting of this Restoration film noir perfectly matched Nyman’s shifting, glittering designs built from fragments derived from Purcell. For The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Nyman’s scoring for strings and high wind instruments is splendid, and the recording is especially vivid, immediate and well-focused. The opening ‘Memorial’, constructed from the usual relentless rhythms, recycling chords and repetitive melodies, is a stunning piece of writing, descending from noble dignity to an orgy of vicious sneering that would have unnerved Hieronymous Bosch. Divorced from the visuals, Nyman’s scores can suggest tenderness, hope and joy. The quasi-liturgical ‘Miserere Paraphrase’, with its taxing part for treble, comes as a surprise, but reminds us that Nyman expressed a wish to move beyond constructing scores like jigsaws.

Much of A Zed And Two Noughts is texturally shrill, scratchy, and still retains its punky edge. Drowning By Numbers is more lyrical (Nyman extracts and transforms material from Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with charm and panache) but the fundamental methodology is much the same. Either album would serve as an adequate introduction to Nyman’s relatively early work; neither would explain to the unconverted why so many of us enjoy this music. Most of Nyman’s compositions from this period are best heard live; none illustrates why some critics hear passion rather than prowess. As for The Piano, anyone who has been in a sensory deprivation tank since 1993 can apply to me for more details. Suffice it to say, its accessible themes stick in the memory as stubbornly as ever.