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So Percussion Summer Institute (SoSI)

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Michael Gordon’s remarkable and critically acclaimed work for orchestra, Decasia, receives its United Kingdom premiere on October 14 during the Southbank Centre’s Ether Festival.

In Decasia, Gordon transforms the sound of the orchestra into a hazy and blurred sonic experience, as if it were “covered in cobwebs, with instruments that had been sitting for a hundred years, creaky and warped and deteriorated, and the musicians happen to come by, pick them up and play.”

Inspired by images from decaying archival film uncovered by filmmaker Bill Morrison, Gordon’s Decasia is an orchestral masterwork for the 21st century…

Mantra Percussion’s New York premiere of Timber at the Brooklyn Academy of Music received a great review from Steve Smith and great reactions from the three nights of audiences and BAM staff: “Michael Gordon’s Timber is its own religious experience, and the members of Mantra are the rhythmic monks who make it so.” — Sarah Garvey, Brooklyn Academy of Music

Click here to read Steve Smith’s review.

From May 11-19, Long Beach Opera stages Michael Gordon’s opera Van Gogh.

Based on Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his beloved younger brother Tlusteheo, an art dealer and often Vincent’s sole means of personal and financial support, Gordon’s powerful opera has been praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “puls[ing] with a distinctive brand of emotional energy that is hard to resist.”

Gordon writes:

I started composing Van Gogh because of my obsession with the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo…

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…

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…

NYT Review: A B-Movie Starlet Becomes an Opera Diva in ‘Acquanetta’

By Seth Colter Walls
January 10, 2018

A large screen looms over the stage. Projected onto it is a black-and-white close-up on an eyeball, fluttering in a state of nervous distress.

An overture, powered by distorted electric guitar and staccato strings, accompanies this sooty B-movie-style image. A choir grasps toward high-pitched wails…

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…