News

Timber Remixed
with Mantra Percussion

now available on Cantaloupe Music

featuring remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Hauschka, Greg Saunier & more…

2-disc set includes Mantra Percussion’s live recording of Timber from the 2014 Bang on a Can Marathon

Also available on limited edition 180g vinyl with six remixes + download card

Now available on CD & vinyl and digitally on iTunes

Watch a video premiere of Squarepusher’s remix on Vice.com

“Beyond the ever-shifting rhythmic crosscurrents that give the music its vigor and hypnotic intensity, ‘Timber’ also plays on tones unique to each plank…

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July 29-30, the Britt Music & Arts Festival, presents the world premiere of Michael Gordon’s newest work for orchestra, Natural History, 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.

Natural History will premiere the morning of July 29, 2016, on the rim of the lake at a location that Gordon scouted, with musicians spatially situated around the site…

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Material
world premiere
May 11-12
Miller Theatre

A new concert-length work for 2 pianists and 2 percussionists; an immersive environment for a uniquely intimate, multisensory series of four portrait concerts over two nights at Columbia University’s legendary new-music mecca!

Columbia University’s iconic Miller Theatre presents the next installment of their Portrait concerts on May 11 and 12, with a new 90-minute world premiere, called Material, for two pianos and two percussionists, performed by New York City’s Yarn/Wire…

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Michael Gordon’s mesmerizing concert-length work, Rushes for 7 bassoons, receives its New York City premiere on October 23 at the Park Avenue Armory performed by The Rushes Ensemble.

Released last year on Cantaloupe Music, Rushes takes its place alongside Gordon’s Timber for expanding the boundaries of a single instrument’s repertoire into hitherto unknown (and at times, otherworldly) spaces…

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Michael Gordon’s sextet for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Gene Takes a Drink, is featured in one of the latest batches of “Shot on iPhone” commercials.

Purchase track from iTunes here.

Rent the performance materials here.

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WQXR/Q2’s Album of the Week
click here to stream the album and read their review

Michael Gordon’s newest album, Dystopia, which includes Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (plus an iTunes exclusive, Gotham), includes some of his most ambitious orchestral projects to date. These works are monumental statements of Gordon’s passion for pushing the modern symphony to its extremes.

The title piece, Dystopia, a city symphony for Los Angeles, was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic…

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On January 30, 2015, Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony premiere the third installment in Gordon’s “city symphonies” for Miami, Florida, after Gotham (New York City) and Dystopia (Los Angeles).

Working in collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison, Gordon creates music with his own reflections for each city. Miami is special for Gordon — it is his hometown.

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On June 3, John Kennedy and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra present the US Premiere of Michael Gordon’s monumental Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Commissioned by the Beethoven-Bonn Festival and premiered by the Bamberger Symphoniker in 2006, Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony filters one of the classics of the symphonic repertoire through the lens of the 21st-century. Not looking to improve on the work’s timeless quality, Gordon imagined “what if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?”

Gordon writes:

Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me…

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On March 25, Cantaloupe Music releases Michael Gordon’s latest CD, Rushes. From March 26 – 29, Michael Gordon’s Rushes, for 7 bassoons, goes on tour in the Northeast culminating in a much-anticipated performance at Peak Performances at Montclair State University.

March 26: Tufts University
March 28: Crane Arts Center
March 29: Peak Performances

Gordon describes the concert-length, mesmerizing work:

Years ago I pursed my lips and blew into a bassoon, and felt the entire instrument buzz as I droned on the very bottom note, a B flat…

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On November 14 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the percussionists of the San Francisco Contemporary Players perform Michael Gordon’s acclaimed, hypnotic, epic concert-length work Timber for 6 percussionists.

Scored for six graduated, amplified, wooden simantras (2x4s) the work brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level. In this work, Gordon shapes the music in both polyrhythmic and dynamic waves of textures — often each players’ hands are in separate rhythmic ‘worlds’, each traversing a different dynamic contour from loud to soft to loud, similar in some respects to his solo for percussion, XY…

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