Michael Gordon
Born: July 20, 1956, Miami Beach, Florida
Michael Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”
Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, this music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness.
Gordon’s most recent work, Travel Guide to Nicaragua, written for The Crossing choir and cellist Maya Beiser, was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Penn Live Arts. The work tells the story of Gordon’s family’s journey from Poland to Nicaragua—chronicling his grandfather’s flight from Poland to his own childhood in the jungle on the outskirts of Managua.
His Field of Vision, a 60-minute, large-scale, outdoor work for 36 percussionists, was commissioned by the Caramoor Center for the Arts and was premiered in July 2022. The work is performed on specially constructed tuned percussion instruments, bass drums, rocks, twigs, industrial metals and gongs. Field of Vision is part of a series of works for single instrument groups composed by Gordon that use spatial arrangement to explore the physical and perceptual experience of music and sound.
For the 2023-24 season, the Kronos Quartet premieres Gordon’s new work of miniatures for string quartet featuring video-vignettes. Gordon and Kronos Quartet have a collaborative partnership extending over decades. Their most recent collaboration, Campaign Songs, featured songs from the canon of American patriotic music in abrasive new arrangements that reflect the issues and division of American life in the 2020s. Campaign Songs was released this summer on Cantaloupe Music. Other collaborations have included Clouded Yellow (2010), Exalted (2010), The Sad Park (2006) and Potassium (2000).
Deeply passionate about the sonic potential of the traditional orchestra, Gordon’s orchestral works include: Natural History, a work written for Crater Lake in Oregon and the 100th anniversary of the United States’ National Parks; Observations on Air, a concerto for bassoon for soloist Peter Whelan, commissioned by the British ensemble Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; and The Unchanging Sea, a piano concerto for Tomoko Mukaiyama with a new film by Bill Morrison; Beijing Harmony, commissioned by the Beijing National Centre for the Performing Arts, a work that projects the kaleidoscopic, perpetual sound of the orchestra to form a sonic architecture; Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a radical reworking of the original, commissioned by the 2006 Beethoven Festival in Bonn and premiered by Jonathon Nott and the Bamberger Symphony; and Sunshine of Your Love, written for more than 100 instruments divided into four microtonally tuned groups. Under the baton of composer/conductor John Adams, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra toured Sunshine of Your Love to seven European capitals in 1999. Gordon’s string orchestra piece Weather was commissioned by the Siemens Foundation Kultur Program and, after its tour, was recorded and released on Nonesuch to great critical and popular success.
His interest in exploring various sound textures has led him to create chamber works that distort traditional classical instruments with electronic effects and guitar pedals, including Potassium for the Kronos Quartet and Industry for cellist Maya Beiser. Also for Kronos, The Sad Park, written in 2006, uses the voices of child witnesses to September 11th as its subject. Gordon’s monumental, 52-minute Trance, originally written for the UK-based group Icebreaker, was debuted in 1997 and recently performed twice in New York City by the ensemble Signal.
Michael Gordon’s special interest in adding dimensionality to the traditional concert experience has led to numerous collaborations with artists in other media, most frequently with filmmaker Bill Morrison and Ridge Theater. In Decasia, a commission from Europäischer Musikmonat for the Basel Sinfonietta, the audience is encircled by the orchestra and large projections. A large-scale, single-movement, relentlessly monumental work about decay—the decay of melody, tuning and classical music itself—Decasia has become a cult favorite since its premiere in 2001, frequently performed at music festivals, art museums and film festivals around the world. Gordon and Morrison’s works together also include film symphonies centered on cities: Dystopia (about Los Angeles) in 2008 for David Robertson and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gotham (about New York City) in 2004 for the American Composers Orchestra. Gordon and Morrison were reunited in the 2015 season for the premiere of a third installment of their city pieces, El Sol Caliente (about Miami), commissioned by the New World Symphony.
Works for theater and opera include What to Wear, a collaboration with director Richard Foreman, which premiered at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles; Acquanetta, about the 1940s B-Movie starlet, for Oper Aachen; Lost Objects, an oratorio for baroque orchestra in collaboration with David Lang, Julia Wolfe and director François Girard, which was seen at the 2004 Next Wave Festival at BAM; and Van Gogh, vocal settings from the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, recorded by Alarm Will Sound. Most recently, Gordon again collaborated with Ridge Theater on the multi-performer song cycle lightning at our feet, co-commissioned by Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the 2008 Next Wave Festival. lightning at our feet straddles arts media, giving Emily Dickinson’s poetry mobility in music while encompassing her words in a world of visual imagery.
Gordon’s music has been featured prominently in the dance works of Emio Greco | PC, Wayne McGregor (for Stuttgart Ballet, Random Dance), Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Heinz Spoerli (for Zürich Ballet), Ashley Page (for The Royal Ballet and The Scottish Ballet) and Club Guy & Roni, who co-commissioned Gordon’s percussion sextet Timber, along with the percussion ensembles Slagwerk Den Haag and Mantra Percussion. This work, an evening-length tour de force for six 2x4s, toured with dance throughout 2009–10 and was premiered in its concert version in June 2011. The full percussion sextet was released on Cantaloupe Records in 2011 and as a remix album in 2014.
Gordon has been commissioned by the New World Symphony, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Stuttgart Ballet, National Centre for the Performing Arts Beijing, BBC Proms, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Settembre Musica, Holland Music Festival, Dresden Festival and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, among others. His music has been performed at the Kennedy Center, Théâtre de la Ville, Barbican Centre, Oper Bonn, Kölner Philharmonie and the Southbank Centre.
The recipient of multiple awards and grants, Gordon has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His recordings include 8 (Cantaloupe), The Unchanging Sea (Cantaloupe), Clouded Yellow (Cantaloupe), Sonatra (Cantaloupe), Natural History (Cantaloupe), Timber Remixed (Cantaloupe), Dystopia (Cantaloupe), Rushes (Cantaloupe), Timber (Cantaloupe), Weather (Nonesuch), Light is Calling (Nonesuch), Decasia (Cantaloupe), [purgatorio] POPOPERA (Cantaloupe), Van Gogh (Cantaloupe), Trance (Argo/Cantaloupe) and Big Noise from Nicaragua (CRI). Formed in 1983 as The Michael Gordon Philharmonic and renamed The Michael Gordon Band in 2000, Gordon’s own ensemble performed across Europe and the U.S. at venues as diverse as Alice Tully Hall and the punk mecca CBGB, on the Contemporary Music Network Tour and at the Almeida Festival in London.
Born in Miami Beach in 1956, Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University and a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.
His music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.
Natural History
- Composed: 2016 on commission from the Britt Music & Arts Festival
- Premiere: July 29–30, 2016 at Crater Lake National Park, Teddy Abrams conducting the Britt Festival Orchestra and Steiger Butte Drum and Singers of Chiloquin, Oregon
- Instrumentation: SATB chorus, Native American drum ensemble, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, 10 high brass in spacial location, 10 low brass in spacial location, timpani, bass drum, glockenspiel, small gong, tam-tam, tambourine, wood block, xylophone, 10 percussion in spacial location, strings
- May Festival Notable Performances: This is the first May Festival performance of Natural History.
- Duration: approx. 25 minutes
Natural History was commissioned by the Britt Music & Arts Festival in celebration of the 2016 National Park Service centennial. Writing the piece took me on a journey through Crater Lake National Park at the height of summer and dead of winter, and to Chiloquin, Oregon to work with the members of the Klamath Tribe’s Steiger Butte Drum. It led me to the naturalist writers Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, among others. This is not the first work in which I have focused on location. I have written pieces about New York (Gotham), Los Angeles (Dystopia), Miami Beach (El Sol Caliente) and Beijing (Beijing Harmony)—all urban settings. When the Britt Festival commissioned me to write a piece for Crater Lake I wasn’t quite sure where it was. The commission included an invitation, “You’ve got to come and see it.” In the summer of 2015, with conductor Teddy Abrams, I went to the site.
Superintendent (head ranger) Craig Ackerman was our guide. Ackerman talked about the lake in terms of “Deep Time”—change happening over thousands of years. This sense of time was a great contrast to the “New York minute” back home. Crater Lake was created by an explosion—a volcano that blew up and then collapsed close to 8,000 years ago. The rim of the caldera falls almost straight down two thousand feet to reach the purest, deepest lake in the United States. That destructive act, which scientists say was more explosive than the world’s nuclear arsenal detonating all at once, wiped out all life for miles around, leaving a spectacular natural wonder.
What do people think about wilderness? This was a question I pondered and studied. The native people who lived at the lake at the time of the explosion still live there today. This place is sacred to them. The first white settlers who came upon the lake in the late 19th century understood that this remarkable place should remain untouched. Park Historian Steve Mark and local journalist Lee Juillerat were important guides to understanding the history.
With Teddy Abrams I circled the rim looking for the perfect spot for the performance. We chose Watchman Overlook for its natural “stage” of panoramic views. Through the course of the day, we talked over the forces for the work—the orchestra, a chorus, 30 additional brass players and percussionists stationed out on the cliffs. The spatial setting was an important aspect of the work—sound coming from all sides and from different distances, sound moving through space. We discussed the importance of having the Klamath Tribe in this piece.
I returned to Crater Lake in the winter of January 2016 for 10 days in the desolate beauty of a completely white landscape—16 feet of snow. Only the rangers were on site, with an occasional snowshoer up for a walk. This trip included a visit to the Klamath Tribe to hear the Steiger Butte Drum. The members of the Drum Group are a part of an extended family. They sit in a circle, beat loudly on one drum and sing. The singing is a fast, sophisticated, syncopated yodeling. It is amazing. Although they had never played with classical instruments, they were game for joining the orchestra. Taylor Tupper, the tribe’s representative, taught me about the Klamath Tribe’s relationship to the lake, which they call “Giiwas.” For the Klamath, the lake is a house of worship. Tribal members go to the lake for spiritual purposes only.
On July 29th, at the premiere, the audience gathered around the rim. Elders from the Klamath Tribe came to listen. Afterward, Don Gentry, Chairman of the Klamath Tribe, said these emotional words: “I could almost envision the sounds of our ancestors reverberating through the ages.” The weaving of musical worlds and a shared love of the natural wonder inspired the writing of Natural History.