I wrote Beijing Harmony as part of Composing China, a project in which I  (along with four other composers) was asked to compose a work that reflected upon my first hand impressions of China. I live in a very big city, New York City, and I was certainly dazzled by Beijing, an even bigger city. Every city produces its own set of harmonies. We tend to think of these harmonies as raucous but cities also have meditative spaces. In Beijing, I was enchanted by Echo Wall, a part of the Temple of Heaven in which voices echo from one side of the structure to the other.

Echoes and reverberations play a big role in Beijing Harmony. While writing this piece I thought about the majesty of Beijing’s architecture and how the past reverberates into the future. I envisioned a modern orchestra performing at the Temple of Heaven in the 15^th century. Because of the expansive spaces in these ancient structures I imagined that the sound would bounce off the stone floors and buildings creating a fanfare of echoes, an acoustical rebounding and ringing that would slowly grow in zeal and fierceness. Because echoes move in space, the sound of the orchestra is constantly moving in a sonic architecture.

The following seating takes full advantage of the spacial elements in Beijing Harmony:

Strings seated in traditional formation from Stage Right to Left in the following order: Vlns. 1-4, Vla., Vc., Cb.

Winds and Brass seated so that Player 1 is Stage Right, Player 2 is Center, and Player 3 is Stage Left.

The 4 French Horns should be similarly spread out from Stage Right to Stage Left.

Tuba, Percussion and Piano do not need special placement.

Beethoven's brutish and loud music has always inspired me. At the time it was written, it was probably the loudest music on the planet. The raw power of his orchestral writing burned through the style of the time.


A commission by the Beethoven-Fest Bonn gave me the opportunity to ask this question: What if someone, while writing a piece of music for orchestra, just happened to stumble over the same material that Beethoven used? What if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?

In Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, I retained one essential musical idea from each movement of the original work. From the first movement, I couldn’t resist working with the huge barbaric opening chords. From the second movement, I took the divine and other-worldly theme, adjusting it slightly so that when it ends, it is in a key one half-step higher. The theme continues to cycle around and slowly spirals up. From the third movement, I lifted the background accompaniment and brought it to the foreground. From the fourth movement I used the main theme.

Did this “rewriting” transform the music, or did the music transform me? Throughout the process I questioned, Who am I to take these precious notes and mash them into clay? But at a certain point I simply got lost in the material. I revelled in its power. I forgot about these questions in my mind. I forgot about Beethoven.
—Michael Gordon

Decasia was commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta for the occasion of European Music Month, which was held in Switzerland in 2001. The piece was conceived as an environmental symphony. Wanting to control the experience completely, we built a concert hall with an enormous, installed set and multimedia design by Ridge Theater in a cavernous, empty warehouse in Basel. Directed by Bob McGrath, the production included projections by Laurie Olinder, a set by Jim Findlay and a film element by Bill Morrison, which was later edited into an independent film with the same title.

Decasia now exists in two formats. The staged version completely alters the performance space, with musicians sitting on a multi-tiered set behind hanging scrims, which provide a surface for the projections and film. The audience stands or sits, surrounded by the set, engulfed in a barrage of sound and imagery.

In the concert version of Decasia, Morrison’s film is projected on a scrim, which can hang behind or in front of the orchestra.

Early in our collaboration, Morrison showed me damaged archival film that he had discovered. It was marred by corrosion and riddled by pockmarks –– the mottled remains of celluloid images. While imagining the music that might complement this film, I thought of a piano that hadn’t been tuned in twenty years. It’s a beautiful sound. Once you’ve heard that sound you never forget it. What’s the orchestral equivalent? I wondered. I set out to make the orchestra sound like it was 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. What would that sound be?

I decided to re-tune the instruments of the orchestra. For example, there are three flutes. One flute plays completely in tune; a second flute is tuned an eighth of a tone higher; and the third flute is tuned an eighth of a tone lower. When all three flutes play in unision, the sound they produce is thickened. The whole orchestra is retuned in this manner. So, here are fine classical musicians who spent their whole lives trying to play perfectly in tune now trying to play perfectly out of tune, which is quite a task.

The first sound you hear is that of eight brake drums. The brake drum is a percussion instrument that is exactly what it sounds like –– an automobile part from a junkyard completely covered with rust. The percussionist scrapes it slowly with a metal beater, creating the hiss that is heard at the beginning of the piece.

Throughout Decasia, you hear music that is very simple, but it is covered up. It’s like something very beautiful that’s been layered with mud and junk, but you can still see how beautiful it is –– you can still see that it is shining.

The resulting sound changes one’s bearing to tonality, melody and harmony. The music becomes unstable. You enter a realm, like standing at the gates of heaven, wondering if there are 500 choirs of angels singing, because the overtones and the out-of-tuneness creates a massive complexity of sonorities.

—Michael Gordon

Weather was commissioned by the Seimans Foundation for the German-based string orchestra, Ensemble Resonanz. Inspired by the chaotic scheme of weather patterns, I wondered how these might transfer musically, as if the past several hundred years of musical ideas were swirling around, and I could just grab things I liked and build on them.

I imagined history as being not so much like a timeline, but like an elevator where I could stop at whatever floor I wanted, and everything was going on simultaneously. The elevator went up to eight, where I found Vivaldi, who of course wrote a massive string piece based loosely on the same subject. Then I went down to the fourth floor, where I found Jimi Hendrix, back up to nine for some 1990’s London club music, then to five for the noise of battleship sirens.

In Weather Two, I put the entire string orchestra through a fuzz box, a distortion unit associated with electric guitars, which I first used in my solo cello piece, Industry. It’s a sound I continue to go back to. Weather Three is constructed from a recording of a siren blast. I harmonize the blast with the string orchestra, slowly transforming this dangerous and edgy warning into a friendlier and calmer sound. Weather One and Weather Four do not use electronics, and can be played unamplified as well as amplified.

The original production of Weather was created in collaboration with filmmaker Elliot Caplan and toured Germany in 1995 as a multimedia production. Soon after, Ensemble Resonanz recorded the piece for the London-based, “drum-and-bass” dance label, Arthrob. The instruments were miked closely, and the sound is up front and aggressive, almost rough.

The connection with Arthrob gave me the opportunity to go into the studio after the work had been recorded and add a layer of drum beats and synthesized sounds. These exist only on the recording. I like to think that Weather does with a string orchestra what a composer in 1723 would have wanted to do had he access to the technology.
—Michael Gordon

In Hyper I attempt to create the musical equivalent of an impossible object, an optical illusion in which an impossible geometry is represented.  Impossible objects fall up, open in and out, and twist irrationally in space. One impossible object is the Penrose Stairs – stairs that climb upward but somehow loop in a circle, so that no matter how far one climbs they always return to the same place. Similarly, music can travel through keys and end up where it began. These types of illusions, which are common in the art of M. C. Escher, are taken to absurdist ends in literary works like Alice in Wonderland: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In Hyper I create quixotic geometries without concern for the laws of physics. It has been a thrill to write for the wonderful musicians of DC8 for their inaugural concert.

Who By Water is inspired by a prayer from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, the service marking the Jewish New Year. The prayer opens as follows: On Rosh Hashanah their destiny is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, how many shall pass away and how many shall be brought into existence; who shall live and who shall die; who shall come to a timely end, and who to an untimely end; who shall perish by fire and who by water. Bill Morrison's accompanying film features distressed black-and-white images of people on the great old ships that crossed the sea before airplanes became the popular mode of travel.

—Michael Gordon

In Love Bead, the ensemble of 13 musicians is divided into two forces that continuously pull and tear at each other and then, like lovers, meet up furiously. The piece is built on a pattern of 25 beats. During the first 20 beats, a low, rumbling cluster of instruments, comprised of electric guitar, trombone, contra-bassoon and bass clarinet, play harsh, industrial rhythms. Simultaneously, a second cluster of keyboard and strings plays blunt, attacking strokes.

The clashing forces come together during the last five beats, closing off the pattern, which then begins again. Love Bead is constructed like a set of beads strung together. As the piece progresses, each “bead” changes slightly, like the rough and jagged wooden “Love Beads” that I used to wear growing up. Love Bead was written for the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern.

—Michael Gordon

I met James Poke, founder of the London-based ensemble Icebreaker, in Amsterdam during the intermission of the premiere of Louis Andriessen's De Materie in 1989. I was standing right next to James, and Louis came over and said, “You and you are friends.” We found a lot to talk about, and, some time later, James called me in a bit of a panic: Icebreaker was making a recording and some of the music hadn't been completed. Would I be willing to write a new piece for them –– quickly?

I was living in Amsterdam at the time and started writing immediately, using a primitive musical notation program called HB Engraver. HB Engraver didn't have barlines –– you put them in yourself. It also allowed me to write odd numbers of triplets, one or two triplets by themselves. I started experimenting with these oddly numbered triplets, finding some joyful, exuberant rhythms that sounded great but looked impossible to play. I discovered, however, that I could put barlines into the music and make measures in which the three triplet notes are split into groups of one and two, and it would all still add up.

This is the origin of the split triplet, which I use throughout Yo Shakespeare, as well as in Trance, Love Bead and other pieces. In Yo Shakespeare, I was able to achieve something that I first attempted to create when I wrote Thou Shalt/Thou Shalt Not!, which is to have a jagged, interrupted rhythmic plot that at the same time feels pulse based and moves forward energetically. I wanted to write visceral music, and I thought of Yo Shakespeare as three salsa bands playing simultaneously, at different but related speeds. I divided the 13 musicians into three groups, one playing the 16th-note pulse, one playing eighth notes and split triplets and, finally, one playing dotted eighths and quarter notes.

One of the oddities of working with Icebreaker is that they sent over a list of rules, a manifesto of sorts, that they asked me to follow, including a rule that the band has final approval of the title of the piece. For fun I submitted three titles and asked them to choose. Yo Shakespeare was a title I came up with because a friend of mine had begun calling me Shakespeare as a way to connect me in his mind to “culture.” I also thought the title was a nice nod from an American composer to a group of UK musicians.

—Michael Gordon

30 years ago, three young composers, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe started a journey together, and they called that journey "Bang on a Can." After hundreds of thousands of miles and hundreds of new pieces, records, productions, marathons and summer festivals, they're still best of friends - on the road together, sharing the journey. The electric Bang on a Can All-Stars power it up. Director Michael Counts and scenic designer Deborah Johnson (aka CandyStations) create an immersive landscape. Road Trip takes us on a cross country trek - celebrating the freedom and mystery of the open road.  Dirt road, country road, two lane blacktop, superhighway.  Destination unknown. Maybe even unknowable.  

I spent most of 2009 going in and out of synagogues to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, for Madeline. Of course she wouldn’t have approved. She was a communist. Madeline lived in a different world, a world of transplanted Yiddish secular culture. I realized all of this only much later. There’s plenty of time to think about these things in synagogue because there are numerous prayers and who can concentrate on so many of them? Madeline loved music and she would take me to concerts when I was little. I would fall asleep but that didn’t deter her. She wanted me to love music as much as she did but she certainly did not want me to be a composer. Madeline, are you listening? I dedicate this piece to your memory.

—Michael Gordon

the light of the dark was written for the ensemble, Eighth Blackbird. In my initial conversations with the musicians, they mentioned the “other” instruments that they play (accordion, guitar, percussion...), and I imagined a chaos onstage, with the musicians grabbing the nearest available instrument and playing music on it. The piece starts with a heavy-metal-esque cello line and builds from there into a kind of out-of-control late-night jam session, complete with unpredictable metallic crashes, swirling virtuosic fiddling and colliding glissandos.
––Michael Gordon

In Idle, three violins play an almost-jig, but each violin plays just slightly after the one before, so that the dance becomes sweet and sour, a jig filled with dissonances and layered textures. Written in the same post-9/11 period as Light Is Calling and Tinge, it is accompanied by electronic loops that were created in my home studio on Desbrosses Street.
––Michael Gordon

Throughout Potassium I use a distortion unit or fuzz box on the string quartet to create a mysterious and charged sound. Potassium begins with major and minor chords sliding in and out of tune –– very simple harmonies that, with the use of electronics and glissandos, become fogged up like a blur, making you unsure of what you are hearing. This music eventually breaks out into a section which I call in the score, “Frenzied Soul Explosion,” with a wilder sliding accompanied by attacking chords. In some part of my brain I must have known that in the Periodic Table of Elements, Potassium is listed as the symbol K. Potassium is dedicated to the Kronos Quartet.


—Michael Gordon
 

acdc is based on a simple, almost pop, chord progression that somehow found its way into 11/8, the basic time signature that runs throughout the whole piece. I layered oddly phrased melodies on top, with the cello playing a pizzacato bass groove.

acdc was commissioned by the Alternate Currents ensemble, which made me think about electricity. I’m not a scientist or engineer, so I was free to imagine that alternating currents were something like two different speeds or rhythms going on simultaneously.

––Michael Gordon

“How strange that they are quiet,” is what I thought when I was writing this piece with its twisting, hushed melodies. In the first, more introspective section, I wanted to create an eerie psychedelic sound world of overlapping tunes. In the second section, which is loud and rhythmic, the ensemble divides into two competing streams, eventually joining up again at the end in a high-pitched, ecstatic revelry. This was the second piece I wrote for the Michael Gordon Philharmonic.
––Michael Gordon

I grew up playing, or miss-playing, the piano. My fear of writing for instruments I can't play is minute in comparison to the fear I have of writing for the piano. But I did finally write this piano piece and I called it Sonatra, less as a tribute to Frank than as an acknowledgment that what I am aiming for is somewhere between sonata and Sinatra.

When I started writing Sonatra I decided that since I would probably only ever write one piano piece in my entire life, I wanted to use all of the keys on the piano and use them often. I constructed long chains or links of major and minor thirds that ceaselessly wind their way up and down the piano. Eventually they start cascading and intersperse with glissandos half the length of the keyboard, sounding to me like the performer has at least four hands.

—Michael Gordon

When I wrote Industry in 1993, I was thinking about the Industrial Revolution, technology, how instruments are tools and how Industry has crept up on us and is all of a sudden overwhelming. I had this vision of a 100-foot cello made out of steel suspended from the sky, a cello the size of a football field, and, in the piece, the cello becomes a hugely distorted sound.

I wrote this piece for Maya Beiser, and it was an incredible process. I would fax her the music and she'd play it to me over the phone. We did this maybe ten times, trying things out. She was constantly teaching me about the cello, and I was making her play things that were really awkward and dark.
—Michael Gordon

In 1943, a former cheesecake model, known only as “Acquanetta,” lit up the screen in the B-movie horror film and now cult classic, Captive Wild Woman. 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. So began a brief career in bread-and-butter films that ended only a few years later when Acquanetta inexplicably walked away from the Hollywood studio system and swanned off to Mexico.

Her past is a mystery. Because of her come-hither stare and sensuous pout, Walter Winchell nicknamed her “The Venezuelan Volcano.” In interviews, she claimed Native American roots, and her obituary in 2004 stated that she was born on an Indian reservation near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Who was Acquanetta, and why did she walk out on her contract with Universal Pictures at the height of her career?

In Acquanetta, the mock serious, campy spirit of horror movies is turned inside out in a bravura, one-act deconstruction of the five minutes that changed Acquanetta’s life forever. The mad scientist Doctor, the insistent Ape, the reluctant Brainy Woman, the visionary Director and the beautiful monster herself, Acquanetta, gather in this re-imagining of that fateful experiment. In soaring, sometimes comic and always indelible songs that perfectly capture the heightened drama of horror films, these vivid characters reveal their inner longings and emotional shadows in what is ultimately a haunting meditation on the meaning of identity, transformation, stereotypes and typecasting, set in the heyday of Hollywood gloss.
––Deborah Artman
Librettist, Acquanetta

Libretto

Cast/Characters:
Acquanetta (mezzo-soprano/alto)
Brainy Woman (soprano)
Ape (coloratura)
Doctor (tenor)
Director (bass/baritone)
Chorus

Scene 1:

Acquanetta, Ape, Brainy Woman, Female Chorus (scream)
Ahhh…, oooh….

Scene 2:
Acquanetta: aria
Conceal me, disguise me, obscure me, exchange me.
Obliterate me, transubstantiate me.
Shield me, mask me, shroud me, blind me, screen me, veil me.
Bury me, transform me, convince me, remake me.
Conceal me, disguise me, hide me, translate me.
Screen me, transform me, camouflage me, transmute me.
Veil me, convert me, transfigure me.
Metamorphose me, obscure me, shroud me, blind me.
Remake me, convince me, alter me, translate me.
Alias me, modify me, cover me up.
Assimilate me, convert me, alias me.
Exchange me, transmute me, transubstantiate me.
Conceal me, disguise me, alter me, bury me.
Assimilate me, obliterate me, hide me.
Transfigure me, turn me, exchange me, remake me.
Convert me, conceal me, modify me, assimilate me.

Scene 3: Musical Interlude
Chorus
Ohhh… (Gasp!)
Strangest of sights!
Introducing Acquanetta.
Burning fire in deep water.

Scene 4:
Doctor: aria

Doctor (urgent and possessed)
Who am I today?
The mad scientist.
I live in the inner sanctum.
The fantastic world of my dreams.
Who do I play today?
I transmutate an ape into a woman.
I glandulate an ape into a captive wild woman.
I’ll transmutate an ape into a woman.

Scene 5:
Ape: aria (+ Female Chorus)

Ape (despairingly)
Because I'm inside this costume –

Chorus
Ahhh…, ohhh…

Ape
Because I’m inside this costume –

Chorus
Ahhh…, ohhh….

Ape
You can't tell if I'm good or bad.
You can’t tell if I’m black or white.
You can’t tell if I’m thin or round.

Chorus
Would it surprise you if I were a woman?
Would it surprise you –

Ape
¬– if I were a woman?
Because I’m inside this costume –

Chorus
Ahhh…, ohhh…

Ape
You don't know if I'm decisive or persuasive.
You don’t know if I’m commanding or alluring.
You don’t know if I’m enlightened or disheartened.
Would it surprise you if I were a woman?

Scene 6:
Doctor/Ape Duet

Doctor (obsessively)
Gown, gloves, mask,
magnifying glass.
Razor, drape,
forcep, scalpel, hand drill.
Bulb syringe,
kellies, tweezer, morphine.
Blood, more blood, more morphine.
Electric coagulator.

Ape
Last week I played the Bones from Beyond.

Doctor
Transmutate –

Ape
Before that the Black Widow.

Doctor
Glandulate –

Ape
It was so hot I almost fainted.

Doctor
Trephinate –

Ape
The Demon Without a Face –
the mask alone took six hours.

Doctor
Evolution, fluctuation –

Ape
A hairy tarantula, the Fog Creature

Doctor
Plasmatic transfusion.

Ape
The Doppelganger, Ooze, a killer bee.

Doctor
Gown, gloves, mask,
magnifying glass.
Razor, drape,
forcep, scalpel, hand drill.

Ape
Would it surprise you if I were a woman?

Doctor
I’ll transmutate an ape into a woman.

Ape
Would it surprise you if I were a woman?

Doctor
I’ll transmutate an ape into a woman.

Scene 7:
Director: aria (+ Chorus)

Director
And cut! (with authority, to Acquanetta) Acquanetta, are you ok in there?
(to Ape) Ape, you are hungry. (to Doctor) And Doctor, a bit more.
(to Brainy Woman) And sweetheart, think of your brain as your first-born child.
(dreamily, to Audience) The medium is black and white.
Movies are made with shadows and light.
I use chiaroscuro, deep shadows that are practically black.
We call them bread-and-butter pictures.
That’s where the big money is – the B’s.
We’ve got to make this movie in ten days.
It might gross over a million the first week.

Chorus
She had a certain something.

Doctor
She had a certain something.
(to his cast) Alright, here we go. Quiet!
Quiet, please. Roll camera! Sound.
Action!

Scene 8:
Brainy Woman (+ Ape + Female Chorus)

Brainy Woman
Please don’t take my brain.
I could be the Queen of Scream.
I could be the ingenue.
I could be the femme fatale.
I could play a real woman.

Chorus
(yodels) Ahhh..

Brainy Woman
Please don’t take my brain.
I could be a bathing beauty.
I could be desirable.

Brainy Woman/Ape
Ahhh…

Chorus
(Gasp!)
I want to play a real woman.

Brainy Woman + Ape + Chorus
I want to play a real woman.

Brainy Woman
I could be the ingenue.
I could be the femme fatale.
Please don’t take my brain.

Scene 9: Quintet

Acquanetta, Brainy Woman, Ape, Director, Doctor
In the celluloid world,
once you are cast, or miscast,
you are that forever.

Scene 10: Musical Interlude

Scene 11:
Acquanetta (+ Cast + Chorus)

Acquanetta
I am your beautiful monster.
Lovely and shy,
I can stop a lion in its tracks.

I am your beautiful monster.
The one with an invented past.
Who will I play today?
The Venezuelan Volcano.
It all happened so fast.

I am your beautiful monster.
Lovely and shy,
I can stop a lion in its tracks.

I am your beautiful monster.
My shadow cast upon the wall
causes fear in people’s hearts.
The secret you want to ignore
is inside this costume.
(yodels) Ahhh…

Ape + Brainy Woman + Chorus
(yodels) Ahhh…

Director ( + Male Chorus + Doctor)
I know you want everything
to be clear and simple as black and white.

Acquanetta (+ Brainy Woman + Ape + Female Chorus)
I am your beautiful monster.
Lovely and shy,
I can stop a lion in its tracks.

Acquanetta + Ape + Brainy Woman
Ahhh…

Doctor + Chorus
Once you are cast or miscast,
The one with the invented past
Burning fire in deep water

Director + Male Chorus + Doctor
I know you want everything
to be clear and simple

I wrote What to Wear with the great American iconoclastic theater personality Richard Foreman, who wrote the libretto and directed the first production at the RedCat Theater in Los Angeles in 2005. What to Wear features a multitude of Madeline X's, who live in a sad, sad world and think about what to wear, and a gigantic Duck that plays golf. Like many of Foreman's scripts, the work is at once incomprehensible and deeply comprehensible.

In the early 2000’s, Richard called me on the phone and asked if I would be interested in working on a piece together. I was a long-time fan of his work and I jumped at the chance. We live within walking distance of each other, and over the next six weeks, Richard dropped off three scripts, each script shorter than the one before. He left me with only one instruction, that I was free to include or not include any part of the script as long as the Duck remained.

In order to better understand Richard's words, I asked him to make me a tape of a read-through of the libretto. Listening to Richard read illuminated his text and gave me the direction I needed to set the words to music. Along with four principal singers –– one male and three female –– the score to What to Wear includes a small woman's chorus and seven instrumentalists.

––Michael Gordon

The Carbon Copy Building is a dynamic and visually stunning trip through the gritty underside of urban life. Words and drawings by celebrated New Yorker comic-strip artist and recent MacArthur Grant recipient Ben Katchor (best known for the dark, witty humor of his cult-classic comic Julius Kniple, Real Estate Photographer) are vividly brought to musical life in a completely collaborative effort from Bang on a Can Co-Artistic Directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. The revolutionary show won the Village Voice 2000 OBIE Award for Best New American Work. After several years, the work is finally out on CD - accompanied by Katchor's beautifully illustrated libretto - in a limited edition hard-bound Book and CD case.

This revolutionary new production embraces the dark, witty humor of Katchor, known for his cult classic underground comic, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, to look at a pair of buildings constructed from the same architectural plan. One stands on a wide, wealthy avenue and the other on the forgotten alley of a fringe neighborhood. Architecturally, the buildings and their plans are identical, but their uses and the people and businesses that inhabit them could not differ more. Combining the striking projections of Katchor's comics with powerful virtuoso performances by a cast of four singers and four musicians (winds, keys, guitar, and drums), the production inventories the contents of the buildings, explores the parallel yet opposite lives of their inhabitants, and uncovers the strange and hilarious places in which the two worlds overlap - finally bringing together the odd lives of each building over a single piece of cherry cheesecake.

Katchor's stark line drawing reverberates with the jagged angularity of Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe's explosive new music to depict a strange and powerful American urban experience.

When I moved into my loft on Desbrosses, the streets were empty, since few people lived there. But both then and now, there were the homeless. Over time the neighborhood changed from an industrial warehouse district to a residential area. Anonymous Man is a memoir about my block. The piece is built around my memories of moving in, meeting my future wife for the first time there, and conversations I have had with two homeless men who made their home on the loading dock across the street.

— Michael Gordon

In 2007, Francisco J. Núñez asked me to write a new piece for his wonderful children's chorus, Young People's Chorus of New York City. He asked me to pick an urban topic, and I thought, What's more urban than the subway? So I decided to set the name of every stop on the F train, which starts in Jamaica, Queens, and ends at Coney Island, Brooklyn. I picked the F Train simply because I liked the names of the stops. Written for treble voices, the chorus is divided into four groups that sing in a close canon throughout.
––Michael Gordon