Michael Gordon (born July 20, 1956) is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
Contents
Life and career
Michael Gordon was born in Miami Beach, Florida on July 20, 1956. He grew up in Nicaragua on the outskirts of Managua in an Eastern European Jewish community before moving back to Miami Beach at age eight.
Gordon's music is an outgrowth of his experience with underground rock bands in New York City and his formal training in composition at Yale where he studied with Martin Bresnick. He is based in New York City.
Bang on a Can
Gordon is one of the founders and artistic directors of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, alongside fellow composers Julia Wolfe—his wife—and David Lang. He has collaborated with them on several projects.
The opera The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, received the 2000 Village Voice Obie Award for Best New American Work. A projected comic strip accompanies and interacts with the singers, and the frames fall away in the telling of the story.
Gordon, Wolfe and Lang subsequently collaborated with librettist Deborah Artman on the 'oratorio' Lost Objects, the recording of which was released in summer 2001 (Teldec New Line).
A further project is Shelter, a multi-media work that was commissioned by the ensemble musikFabrik and features the Scandinavian vocalists Trio Mediaeval in a staged spectacle that, in the words of librettist Deborah Artman, "evokes the power and threat of nature, the soaring frontier promise contained in the framing of a new house, the pure aesthetic beauty of blueprints, the sweet architecture of sound and the uneasy vulnerability that underlies even the safety of our sleep." Shelter was premiered in Cologne in Germany in spring 2005, and received its US premiere in November 2005.
Both Shelter and Carbon Copy Building were staged by New York's Ridge Theater, in collaboration with Laurie Olinder (visual graphics), Bill Morrison (filmmaker) and Bob McGrath (director), with whom Gordon has often worked. The opera Chaos, with libretto by Matthew Maguire, premiered at The Kitchen in New York in the autumn of 1998 with stage direction by Bob McGrath. The work, which opened to rave reviews and packed houses, is a fast-paced science fiction spectacle in 25 short scenes.
In 2017, Chinese singer Gong Linna premiered Cloud River Mountain, written by the three Bang on a Can composers in addition to Lao Luo. They also premiered Road Trip, a celebration of Bang on a Can's 30-year journey, together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2017.
Music
Gordon's music incorporates elements of dissonance, minimalism, modality, and popular culture.
His music has been presented at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, The Proms, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, the Kölner Philharmonie, Royal Albert Hall, the Bonn Oper, and the Jewish Museum Vienna, as well as at the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, St. Petersburg, Holland, Adelaide, Huddersfield, Settembre Musica and Dresden music festivals. In addition, his music has been choreographed by Eliot Feld, The Royal Ballet, 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. In 2017, Douglas Lee choreographed a Gordon score for the Ballett Zürich, and in 2018 Brian Brooks choreographed another score for the Miami City Ballet. Gordon is also a featured artist in the repertoires of Ensemble Modern, Alarm Will Sound, and the Kronos Quartet.
Notable works
Since 1991, Gordon has worked extensively with video. His work Van Gogh Video Opera, a collaboration with video artist Elliott Caplan, premiered to critical acclaim in New York in 1991 and received its European premiere in Vienna in 1992. Other works with Caplan include Grand Dairy, based on a diner on New York's Lower East Side, which was produced in Vienna in 1996, and Weather (German Tour 1997), in which the 16 string players of Ensemble Resonanz perform on a vertical stage surrounded by video panels. The recording of Weather is available on Arthrob/Nonesuch Records. In 1997 he worked with playwright Anna Deavere Smith on House Arrest, First Edition, which premiered at the Arena Stage Theater in Washington, DC.
Gordon's percussion sextet Timber was written for the percussion ensembles Slagwerk Den Haag and Mantra Percussion. This work, an evening-length piece for six 2x4 boards (standard North American softwood dimensional lumber used for buildings, with profile of nominally 2 × 4 inches, but of 1.5 x 3.5 inches in modern practice), toured with dance throughout 2009–10 and was premiered in its concert version in June 2011. The full percussion sextet was released on Cantaloupe Music in 2011. In 2014–15 it was played in Walt Disney Concert Hall (performed by So Percussion and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), in Belgium (by Ictus), and in Scandinavia (by Nordic Seks). Other recent pieces for single-instrument ensembles include Rushes for seven bassoons and Amplified for four electric guitars.
Decasia, a large-scale symphony with projections commissioned by the Europäischer Musikmonat 2001 for the Basel Sinfonietta, was also staged by the Ridge Theater. The orchestra sits on a triangular pyramid structure that surrounds the audience, while Bill Morrison's film of black and white 'found' footage in various states of deterioration is projected onto scrim draping the structure. The ensuing Bill Morrison film, Decasia, cut to Michael Gordon's complete score, was shown at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and has been screened at film festivals worldwide.
Other large-scale symphonic works include Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, a revised composition of Beethoven’s original symphony, commissioned by the 2006 Beethoven Festival in Bonn and premiered by Jonathan Nott and the Bamberg Symphony, and Sunshine of your Love, written for over 100 instruments divided into four microtonally tuned groups. Under the baton of composer/conductor John Adams, the Ensemble Modern toured Sunshine of your Love to seven European capitals in 1999.
Awards and recognition
The recipient of multiple awards and grants, Gordon has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Formed in 1983 as the "Michael Gordon Philharmonic" and renamed the "Michael Gordon Band" in 2000, Gordon's own ensemble has performed across Europe and the United States at venues such as Alice Tully Hall and the punk mecca CBGB, on the Contemporary Music Network Tour, and at the Almeida Festival in London. In September 2016 Gordon was named the first-ever composer-in-residence of the Young People's Chorus of New York City.
Recordings
Big Noise from Nicaragua (1994)
Weather (1999)
Decasia (2002)
Light is Calling (2004)
Trance (2004)
Van Gogh (2008)
(purgatorio) POPOPERA (2008)
Timber (2011)
Rushes (2014)
Dystopia (2015)
Gotham (2015)
Sonatra (2018)
Clouded Yellow (2018)
Field of Vision (2026)