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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Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra
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Finding ‘Lost Objects’ in Germany
March 22, 2007
(…) Concerto Köln, which has about 30 members, is a collective: They own their work and manage themselves. The members are involved in the creation of every project. This is very unusual. Orchestras usually are run from the top down. The board of directors hires the management, which hires the conductor and the orchestra. The low people on the totem pole are the musicians, whose professional lives are dictated to from above. Here with Concerto Köln, and with a few other orchestras that I have worked with (mostly in Europe), management is hired by the orchestra…
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Field of Vision
Field of Vision (2022) is a 60-minute, large-scale, outdoor work for 36 percussionists. Commissioned by the Caramoor Center for the Arts, it is performed on specially-constructed tuned percussion instruments, industrial metals, and gongs — each a resonant instrument that produce a complex spectrum of overtones and resonances. The number of percussionists and the vast playing field highlights the perspective and the architectural movement of sound.
Field of Vision (excerpt) at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA) July 27, 2022
Doug Perkins conducting University of Michigan percussion and SoSI
Field of Vision (excerpt) at Caramoor (Katonah, NY) July 24, 2022
Doug Perkins conducting University of Michigan percussion and SoSI
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Decasia 20th Anniversary
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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Manchester Collective’s video premiere: Weather
Michael 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…
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