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Decasia receives UK premiere!

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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…

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Michael Gordon’s new album Dystopia

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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interviews

Lightning at our feet

December 8, 2008

Composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison share their multimedia piece Lightning at Our Feet, inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

interviews

Gotham – a Filmic Symphony

March 8, 2007

Listen to Michael Gordon’s ”Gotham,” a filmic symphony in collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison. For this program, these two artists discuss their ongoing collaboration of new music and old decaying silent film prints.

”Gotham,” brought to life by the team at the Ridge Theatre who put together Gordon’s 2001 multi-media experience ”Decasia,” is structured along the Decasia model with the city of New York as its subject and star. The live concert version incorporates projections (including an opening sequence with a sheep), re-edited archival film, multi-tiered sets, and musicians who sometimes seem actually to inhabit the projected environment…

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Biography

Michael Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of  The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”

Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio…

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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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writing

The Accidental Music Lesson

January 25, 2010

In a way, this is a tale of two cities

This past November I went to my hometown, Miami Beach, for a performance by the New World Symphony of my orchestral work, Gotham, a three-movement symphony that takes the city of New York as its subject. It is part of an ongoing project of ‘film symphonies’ that I am creating with filmmaker Bill Morrison to capture the aura of cities.

My family moved to Miami Beach from Nicaragua when I was eight years old…

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