Over 2 consecutive weekends this month (April 14 and 21) Mantra Percussion performs my percussion sextet, Timber, in six incredible, unexpected resonant spaces across New York City: Castle Clinton (Manhattan), Federal Hall (Manhattan), DUMBO Archway (Brooklyn), Queens Boulevard 7-Train Viaduct (Queens), Endale Archway in Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park (Brooklyn)…
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The perpetually groundbreaking Kronos Quartet welcomes a once-in-a-lifetime lineup of guest artists and ensembles to celebrate its 50th anniversary at Carnegie Hall, including a preview performance of Michael Gordon’s gfedcba, which receives its world premiere in March by the Kronos Quartet at Cal Performances in Berkeley.
Read More![[IMAGE] Travel Guide to Nicaragua](https://michaelgordon.sqcdy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screen-Shot-2022-11-02-at-7.10.51-PM-400x343.png)
On November 16 in Philadelphia at Congregation Rudolph Shalom and November 17 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser (Donald Nally, conductor) premiere Michael Gordon’s new work Travel Guide to Nicaragua. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, Travel Guide to Nicaragua is written for The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser, with projections by Laurie Olinder and lighting by Eric Southern…
Read MoreMichael Gordon’s 1997 string orchestra work, Weather, is brought to life in a musical tour-de-force — a brand new collaboration between the UK’s Manchester Collective, award-winning BBC documentary sound artist Chris Watson and Spanish filmmaker Carlos Casas.
On Thursday October 13 the Manchester Collective premieres a video of their collaboration. Combining live performance, field recordings and film, the collaborators transport the audience from an East Asian rainforest to the world’s oldest desert; from an Icelandic glacier to the sunken medieval town of Dunwich off the English coast…
Read MoreSunday July 24, at Caramoor Music Center in Katonah, NY, Michael Gordon’s Field of Vision is premiered by conductor Doug Perkins and the University of Michigan percussion ensemble along with So Percussion Summer Institute Fellows. The work continues up the East Coast to PS 21 in Chatham, NY on Monday July 25, then to North Adams, MA on July 29 for Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA…
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The ferocious piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire reprised their 2016 premiere of Material January 28-29 at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Gordon writes:
Outside my window on Desbrosses Street, a giant piledriver is rhythmically knocking a metal column into the earth. From my studio I hear the resonance, a complex palette of ringing overtones which linger in the air for a few seconds and then disappear…
Read More20 years ago, just a few months after the world-changing events of 9/11, Michael Gordon traveled to Switzerland to see the Basel Sinfonietta and conductor Kasper de Roo premiere his concert-length work for orchestra, Decasia, which accompanied a film by Bill Morrison — now itself a cult classic that is studied in film schools around the world.
View the score, watch film excerpt, and listen to complete work, click here
“The music’s purely visceral power [is] hard to resist.” — The New York Times
“…its incessant pulses – by turns buoyant and threatening – support a sound world in which the amplified instruments, carefully tuned microtones apart, create layers of fiercely dissonant harmony, punctuated by beats and difference tones…
Read MoreMichael Gordon
July
live.bangonacan.org
JULY 1 – 31
In spring of 2020, in isolation, I wrote a short piano piece every day. At the end of the day I would send the piece to the pianist Vicky Chow. On each day in July 2020, Vicky released the 31 piano works, one a day, on Instagram. Now in 2021 we are sharing July with an amazing array of pianists …
Read MoreMichael Gordon’s 8 (for eight cellos) available now in digital audio or CD (score and parts available through Ricordi NY/Universal Music Group) is part of a series of works for multiples of a single instrument that began with Timber for six pieces of wood, and includes Rushes for seven bassoons and Amplified for four electric guitars. Each of these works is meant to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state, in the listener as well as the performer…
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When a Critic Hosts the Premiere
[link to article]
Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020
“Please silence your cellphones.”
There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week…
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