Michael Gordon
Michael Gordon was 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 at Yale, is attracting an enthusiastic international
following. Audiences literally erupted after recent performances
throughout Europe of Gordon’s orchestral piece, Sunshine
of Your Love. His opera Chaos, a science
fiction spectacle with a libretto by Matthew Maquire, premiered
in New York to rave reviews and packed houses.
Gordon’s early
compositions demonstrate a deep exploration into the possibilities
and nature of rhythm and what happens when rhythms are piled
on top of each other, creating a glorious confusion. John
Adams, who has conducted Gordon’s works with the London
Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern, calls these raw and complicated
sounds “irrational rhythms”. Recent pieces—including
the hypnotic Trance for large ensemble – pursue
even further the mysterious divide between consonance and dissonance.
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 Emmy Award-winning video artist Elliot Caplan that recently
toured Germany, the musicians sit on scaffolding three stories
high. Surrounded by video monitors, rear projections and
a scrim, the orchestra seems to float between a veil and grid
of constantly moving images. In Gordon’s upcoming
multimedia piece, Decasia, a commission from Basel Sinfonietta,
the audience sits on swivel chairs encircled by the orchestra
and large projection scrims.
In Gordon’s
exuberant and haunting opera, the Carbon Copy Building,
a collaboration with comic book artist Ban Katchor, Bob McGrath
and the Ridge Theater and the composers David Lang and Julia
Wolfe that received the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best
New American Work, a projected comic strip accompanies the singers,
interacting with each other so that the frames fall away in
the telling of the story. And in Lost Objects,
a staged oratorio that premiered at the Dresden Music Festival
in 2001, Gordon worked with the iconoclastic Barcelona theater
company, La Fura Dels Baus.
Gordon’s music
has been presented at BAM, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center,
The Kitchen, the Kollner Philharmonie, Royal Albert Hall, the
Bohn Oper and the Jewish Museum in Vienna; at the Sydney 2000
Olympic Arts Festival and the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, St Petersberg,
Holland, Adelaide, Huddersfield, Settembre and the Dresden music
festivals; in the choreography of Eliot Field, the Royal Ballet
and other dance companies; and as a featured artist in the repertoires
of Ensemble Modern and London’s Icebreaker Ensemble.
In 1983, Gordon formed
the Michael Gordon Philharmonic—part string quartet, part
rock band—that performed his angular tunes and driving
rhythms with compelling energy and off-beat humor in concerts
worldwide. The latest incarnation of this ensemble, now
called the Michael Gordon Band, debuted at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music’s Next Wave Festival in December 2000.
Born in Miami Beach
in 1956, 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 and Co-Artistic Director of the Bang on a Can
Festival, a major force in the presentation of new music.
His CDs include Weather (Nonesuch), Trance
(Argo), and Big Noise From Nicaragua (CRI).
The New Yorkers —
2003 Next Wave Festival
Bang on a Can Marathon — 2001 Next Wave Festival
Bang on a Can Marathon — 2000 Next Wave Festival