On October 14 at Bowling Green State University, Mantra Percussion gives the US premiere of Michael Gordon's percussion sextet, Timber — followed by a North American tour that includes the Canadian premiere on October 22 at the X Avant Festival (with indie rock-duo Buke & Gass).
The new work, an evening-length tour de force scored for six graduated wooden 2x4s brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level…
continue readingAvailable now on iTunes and (in stunning wooden case) at Cantaloupe Music. Listen to NPR’s All Things Considered review.
Timber’s wooden CD case
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2cubmnH6MQ]a 10min video about Timber
On August 30, Michael Gordon’s new percussion sextet, Timber, is released in a very cool wooden CD case on Cantaloupe Music, but is available now for download through iTunes…
continue readingOn October 14 at Bowling Green State University, Mantra Percussion gives the US premiere of Michael Gordon’s percussion sextet, Timber — followed by a North American tour that includes the Canadian premiere on October 22 at the X Avant Festival (with indie rock-duo Buke & Gass).
The new work, an evening-length tour de force scored for six graduated wooden 2x4s brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level…
continue readingOn June 16 at Korzo Theatre in Den Haag, The Netherlands, the Dutch percussion group Slagwerk Den Haag gives the world premiere of Michael Gordon’s percussion sextet, Timber, an evening-length tour de force.
Scored for six graduated wooden 2x4s, or Simantras (Greek liturgical percussion instruments used by French composer Iannis Xenakis), the work brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level…
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 readingMichael 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.
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…
continue readingMichael 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…
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 readingMichael 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…
continue reading