News

Yarn/Wire reprises ‘Material’ at The Momentary in Arkansas

February 2, 2022

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…

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Decasia 20th Anniversary

November 4, 2021

20 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…

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8: new music for eight cellos recorded by Cello Octet Amsterdam

April 23, 2021

Michael 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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House Music premiere featured in NY Times

February 19, 2020

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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premiere performance: City Symphonies trilogy

June 10, 2019

On May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presented three powerful City Symphonies by Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison, performed for the first time as a trilogy by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.

Gotham (2004) for New York, Dystopia (2008) for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente (2015) for Miami Beach celebrate the character of place and how it evolves, pairing image and music to share the energy, chaos and beauty of urban life…

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Natural History: PBS doc “Symphony for Nature”

March 6, 2018

The PBS documentary “Symphony for Nature” is broadcast nationwide tells the story of the premiere of Michael Gordon’s inspirational work Natural History for orchestra, chorus, and Native American drummers.

The full recording of Natural History has been released on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with the broadcast of the documentary. Click here to stream the full recording.

Gordon’s work, inspired by Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and commissioned by the Britt Orchestra as part of the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service, premiered the morning of July 29, 2016, on the rim of the lake with musicians spatially situated around the site…

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