The Crossing choir (Donald Nally, conductor) premieres a beautifully filmed video (by Four/Ten Media) of “To The West”, one movement from Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison’s upcoming work Montaña — a project unfolding over the course of four years.
Each summer the artists meet in Big Sky, Montana to work on movements that will ultimately become a spatial work for a cappella choir and film…
continue readingMichael 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…
continue reading20 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…
continue readingOver 2 consecutive weekends this month (April 14 and 21) Mantra Percussion performs my percussion sextet, Timber, in six incredible, unexpected resonant spaces across New York City: Castle Clinton (Manhattan), Federal Hall (Manhattan), DUMBO Archway (Brooklyn), Queens Boulevard 7-Train Viaduct (Queens), Endale Archway in Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park (Brooklyn)…
continue readingOn May 7, London’s Barbican Centre presents the BBC Symphony in the UK premiere of Michael Gordon’s Rewriting Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Commissioned by the Beethoven-Bonn Festival and premiered by the Bamberger Symphoniker in 2006, Gordon’s remarkable re-imagining filters one of the classics of the classics through the lens of the 21st-century. Not looking to improve on the work’s timeless quality, but to imagine ‘what if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?’
Gordon writes:
Read more…Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me…
continue readingOn Saturday, September 15, Michael Gordon’s newest work, Rushes for 7 bassoons, is premiered by the Rushes Ensemble at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY.
The new work is a 60+ minute tour-de-force that takes some inspiration from his recent work for percussion, Timber. In the new work Gordon shifts polyrhythmic material not only through timbre and dynamics, but by weaving melodic lines into the kaleidoscopic waves of rhythmic texture…
continue readingOn Thursday, November 8, Michael Gordon’s newest work, Rushes for 7 bassoons, is given its European premiere by the Rushes Ensemble at the November Music Festival in Den Boasch followed by a tour in The Netherlands and Belgium:
November 10 – GLOW Festival in Eindoven
November 11 – Rushes and Timber at the SURROUND Festival in Brugge
November 15 – Ostadetheater in Amsterdam
November 16 – Korzo Theater in Den Haag
The new work is a 60+ minute tour-de-force that takes some inspiration from his recent work for percussion, Timber…
continue readingMantra Percussion’s New York premiere of Timber at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, December 13-15, has been listed as one of the top ten performances for 2012 by Alex Ross (The New Yorker) and Steve Smith (TimeOut New York).
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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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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