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So Percussion Summer Institute (SoSI)

Sunday 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…

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…

At the Barbican Centre in London, on March 20, 2012, the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere Field Recordings — with new works by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe. The evening-length project that is as much a mystery as a concert – a kind of ghost story. The ghosts aren’t the physical presence of people gone before, but they are the ghosts of sounds, images, ideas, and voices. Each composer has been asked to find and interact with something recorded before, using the power of music made right in front of us to reach out to other things not present…

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…

Michael Gordon’s percussion sextet Timber, “six players, six two-by-fours, one hour of aural hypnosis” (TimeOut NY) is toured from Canada to Ireland to Germany and beyond by co-commissioners Slagwerk Den Haag and Mantra Percussion.

• 8 March Muziekgebouw — Amsterdam (SDH)
• 9 March Vancouver New Music — Canada (MP)
• 15 March Maerzmuzik — Berlin (SDH)
• 21 March den Toonzal — Den Bosch, Holland (SDH)
• 7 April Music Biennale Zagreb — Croatia (SDH)
• 30 April TimberRemixed — Brooklyn, NY (MP)
• 4 May Drogheda Arts Festival 2013 — Louth, Ireland (MP)
• 26 May Landgoedconcerten Oranjewoud — Langezwaag, Holland (SDH)

Recognized by The New Yorker Magazine as one of the ten most memorable performances of 2012, Timber is a mesmerizing and unique evening-length work…

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…

From January 9 – 14, the Prototype Festival presents a new, commissioned, chamber version of Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Based on a 1940’s B-movie horror flick called Captive Wild Woman, starring an enigmatic actress and former cheesecake model named Acquanetta, the opera’s libretto is written by Deborah Artman.

Stunning and exotic, Acquanetta played the untameable and gorgeous creation resulting from a mad scientist’s experiments on an ape, a role the young actress sizzled in and played so well a sequel was soon in the can…