Michael Gordon was born in Miami Beach, Florida, and raised in Nicaragua in an Eastern European community on the outskirts of Managua.  His music, which combines the intensity and power of rock music and his formal composition studies, has been performed throughout the world. 

Gordon’s special interest in adding dimensionality to the concert experience has led to frequent collaborations with artists in other media.  In his string orchestra piece Weather, a collaboration with video artist Elliot Caplan, the musicians sit on scaffolding three tiers high, surrounded by video monitors, rear projections and a scrim.  In Gordon’s 2001 multimedia orchestra piece, Decasia, the audience sits on swivel chairs encircled by the orchestra and large projection scrims. In The Carbon Copy Building, an opera collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, Bob McGrath and the Ridge Theater, and the composers David Lang and Julia Wolfe, a projected comic strip accompanies the singers. The piece received the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work. Gordon premiered Gotham at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in 2004; the work incorporates film, projections, lighting and an orchestra of 35 musicians to explore the "other" New York City. 

Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Masters of Music from the Yale School of Music.  He is co-founder of the Bang on a Can Festival, a major force in the presentation of new music.  His recordings include Weather and Light Is Calling (Nonesuch), Trance and Decasia (Cantaloupe), Lost Objects (Teldec), and Big Noise from Nicaragua (CRI).

About Potassium Gordon writes:

“When I started writing this string quartet, I wanted to distance myself from everything I knew about string quartets.  The word ‘potassium’ meant almost nothing to me, and so it helped provide a blank slate from which to begin.  Potassium is an element, a substance that cannot be broken down into a simpler substance.  In some part of my brain I must have known that on the Periodic Table of the Elements, Potassium is listed as the symbol K.  Potassium is dedicated to the Kronos Quartet.”

Michael Gordon's Potassium was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by its Board of Directors on the occasion of Kronos' 25th anniversary.