In creating a work for classical bassoonist Peter Whelan and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment I drew upon the Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air - a treatise by the Age of Enlightenment British scientist and radical theologian Joseph Priestley. Credited with the discovery of oxygen and the concept of the ecosystem, along with a myriad of inventions (including soda water), Priestley was the rare combination of a free-thinker and man of faith. 

Priestley first came in contact with London resident Benjamin Franklin and other Enlightenment figures in 1765 at the biweekly meetings of the Club of Honest Whigs. The club was a free-wheeling alcohol-infused gathering of philosophers, dissenting theologians, and amateur scientists. I can imagine the energy and excitement of these gatherings - the sense of discovery. Observations on Air is an homage to Preistley. The bassoon takes the lead as the other instruments join in conversation. We are in the London Coffee House with the Honest Whigs - the exchange of radical thoughts spinning into music.

With El Sol Caliente we return to the City Symphony, a form we have explored in two earlier pieces, Gotham and Dystopia, which were based on New York and Los Angeles respectively. Our collaborative process is unusual in that the music was written first and the film, while conceived and researched in tandem with the music, was edited to the completed score. El Sol Caliente was designed to take advantage of the New World Center’s exquisite multi-media facilities. In addition to the five overhead sails that are part of the venue’s singular projection design, we have added three additional screens over the orchestra seating terraces, surrounding the orchestra with eight total projection surfaces. The orchestra is specifically arranged on stage to highlight the use of an architectural movement of sound that runs throughout the music. These sound waves, ebbing and flowing, are a constant reminiscence of the forces of nature enveloping the magical strip of land called Miami Beach.

El Sol Caliente incorporates archival footage from the early and mid-20th century culled from newsreels, tourism films, home movies, as well as original contemporary footage. The tropes remain familiar throughout the century - bathing beauties, hurricanes, and families vacationing in Art Deco hotels. We see men wrestling alligators and manatees, symbolically wresting South Florida from the swamp and into the world's imagination as a tourist destination. Yet this fragile barrier island lying off a continental peninsula at sea level will probably not survive this century without a drastic intervention on its behalf. How will we wrest Miami Beach from nature in the 21st century?

— Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison

Capturing the aura of cities is an ongoing project I have with filmmaker Bill Morrison. With Dystopia we turned to Los Angeles for inspiration. The goal was to start at high speed and never slow down, like a ride down the freeway at 90 mph with only a few detours. The question we ask ourselves about the ride is, ''Is it beautiful or is it ugly?''

I've tried to translate this question into musical terms by asking, ''Do I want to hear an orchestra that is neat and well manicured or frenzied and chaotic?'' Musically, I explore the gray areas between harmony and dissonance, where pleasure meets pain. I thought about the sound of a phonograph record speeding up and slowing down — that point where you hear the beauty of the music but also its altered state. I have slurred into a great blender disparate sounds taken from a palette that stretches from the Renaissance composer Johannes Ockeghem to contemporary Drum and Bass (a 1990s dance music characterized by very rapid tempos). Don't be disappointed if you don't recognize any of these influences.

Bill Morrison's visual material is a combination of new footage shot in Los Angeles and archival footage. From the Library of Congress comes the first film ever shot in Los Angeles, ''South Spring Street, Los Angeles,'' by Thomas Edison in 1898 and featuring horse driven carriages.

Like in Decasia, Gotham, and our other collaborations, the music was composed first, and then the film was cut to the score.
—Michael Gordon

Gotham is the first piece of an ongoing collaboration I have with filmmaker Bill Morrison. The idea of the series is to capture the aura of a city through music and imagery. In this case, the city is our city where we both live –– New York.

Everyone who lives in a big urban place has a special spot that they have found where their soul relaxes. In the first movement of Gotham, I was thinking about the places we go to escape New York while being in New York. The spare opening music, which starts with solo violin and piano, slowly becomes majestic as the strings, winds and then brass join in. Images of old New York begin with a surprising scene of a man tending sheep. As the camera pulls back, the surrounding urban landscape is revealed, and the viewer realizes he is tending sheep in what is now Central Park.

In this collaboration, the film footage has been cut to the music. The film is primarily vintage black-and-white footage in Bill Morrison’s signature style, where the celluloid has decayed to the point that the film provides an ongoing commentary of psychedelic splotches and graffiti on top of the visual imagery.

The middle movement captures the daily assault of the city, with a hyper-intense pulse in the orchestra and blaring glissandos in the trumpets, almost reminiscent of sirens and carhorns and the industrial howls of New York life.

The third section is a wild jig, with rhythmic violins setting the pace and all the other instruments piling in until there is a huge mass of sound – an ecstatic dance gone wrong.

Gotham looks at the underside of the city –– the sidewalks, manhole covers, the construction –– what goes on in daily life here. Living through 9/11 made me think about where I live with fresh eyes and fresh ears. I wondered, Why am I living here? One doesn’t live in New York City because it is beautiful or an easy life. Those aren’t the reasons. It’s intense, it’s noisy, it’s exciting, it’s dirty. It really juices you up. In Gotham, we took a fresh look.
––Michael Gordon

There is a lot of music about love. I am not sure why most of it is soft and gentle. Love is one of the world’s most powerful forces. One cannot touch it or even be precise about what it is. To me, making a statement about love is to make something loud and mysterious and huge.

I wrote Sunshine of Your Love for the Ensemble Modern Orchestra. I knew that it would be on a program with Ives’ Fourth Symphony and a new work by John Adams, Naïve and Sentimental Music. John was to conduct, and I asked for every single instrument available and a few more to boot.

The orchestra is divided into four groups consisting of violins, high winds and brass, each tuned one-eighth of a tone apart. Each of these groups is supported by a keyboard tuned similarly. The four groups trade off a melody that ascends and descends in eighth tones. The lower instruments, along with percussion, two electric guitars and two electric basses, support the upper instruments with insistent and driving rhythm.
The title comes from a song by Cream. As a boy, I listened to their album, Disraeli Gears, over and over while trying to decipher the psychedelic cover. The dark, moody, raw music that accompanied this love song was a revelation to me.

—Michael Gordon

In 1992 I was given the opportunity to write my first orchestral work for the Yale Bach Society Orchestra. I modeled this piece on the compact nature of the short symphonies of J.C. Bach, adding a fourth movement typical of the later classical period –– all squeezed into nine minutes.
––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

Gene takes a walk around the community gardens on the corner of Avenue C and East 9th St.

Camera by Gene. Edited by Bill Morrison

Working on this string quartet, I found myself thinking about the Clouded Yellow. This butterfly takes part in mass migrations that are referred to in England as “clouded yellow years.” I love the image of a cloud of bright yellow butterflies, and I think the word “clouded” describes the blurred harmonies and melodies of this piece. 

I began working on Timber in 2009 at the invitation of the Dutch-based dance group, Club Guy & Roni, and the percussion ensembles Slagwerk Den Haag and Mantra Percussion. I had written many orchestral works over the decade, beginning with Decasia in 2001 up to Dystopia in 2007, and I wanted to clear my mind of pitches and orchestration.

For that reason, I decided early on that Timber would be for non-tuned percussion and that each percussionist would play one instrument only. I thought of composing this music as being like taking a trip out into the desert. I was counting on the stark palette and the challenge of survival to clear my brain and bring on visions.

I imagined that the six instruments would go from high to low, and that, through a shifting of dynamics from one instrument to the next, the group could make seamless and unified descending or ascending patterns. After working on rhythmic sketches with Mantra Percussion in early 2009, I went to Amsterdam in June to workshop my ideas with Slagwerk Den Haag. I had the plan but I was searching for the right instruments.

After some experimentation, Slagwerk's Fedor Teunisse brought out a set of wooden simantras. These slabs of wood, which looked like standard building materials from a lumberyard to me, had a gorgeous sound. It was distinct enough so that the clarity of the percussive hits could be heard, and was also extremely resonant, producing a complex field of overtones. With inspiration from this discovery, I returned to New York to finished the music for Club Guy & Roni's extravaganza 'Pinball and Grace,' which premiered in October of 2009.

—Michael Gordon

Part 1: Two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire came.
Part 2: There was a big boom and then there was teeny fiery coming out.
Part 3: I just heard that on the news that the buildings are crashing down.
Part 4: And all the persons that were in the airplane died.
The recordings used in this piece are of children, ages 3 and 4, and were made by Loyan Beausoleil, a pre-kindergarten teacher at University Plaza Nursery School in Lower Manhattan, between September 2001 and January 2002. (My son Lev was in Ms. Beausoleil’s class during this period.) Her ongoing work with these children is chronicled at http:www.youngestwitnesses.com

When I heard these recordings I was struck by the raw tunefulness of the children’s speech. These specific segments were chosen for their musicality as well as for their content. I worked with sound designer Luke DuBois on the post-production of these tapes. In Parts 1 and 3, the sound clips are gradually slowed down to reveal the hidden acoustical properties of the speech. Parts 2 and 4 use an electronic music technique called granular synthesis, in which tiny ''grains'' of sound from the original source are captured and compacted together.

—Michael Gordon

I wrote Tinge during the same post-9/11 period as Light Is Calling and Idle. I wanted to cheer myself up and make some fun music, so I decided to work with loops of salsa bands, whose timbre I altered and harmonics I rearranged. I imagined that this fantasy salsa band was playing with a Baroque-inspired coterie of acoustic violins, and that together they played a strange type of hyper Baroque-salsa.
––Michael Gordon

Weather One is the first movement from my piece for string orchestra, Weather, in an arrangement for string sextet. 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.

Weather One is influenced by Vivaldi's motoric string writing and use of canons, where the melody played by an instrument is immediately played by another in close succession.
––Michael Gordon

The legendary Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” includes a false fadeout –– you think it is the end but then the music returns and is turned upside down. Nothing is as it was. Then John Lennon says, “Cranberry sauce.” His voice was lowered an octave in the recording studio, and all the world believed that Lennon said, ''I buried Paul.'' When the record came out, people went crazy trying to find other clues that Paul McCartney was really dead. DJs played Beatles records backwards on the radio, and, as a result, some very strange music — and a lot of noise — was broadcast. This piece is about that noise.


—Michael Gordon

The Low Quartet is an advocation for the rich, low, reedy register of the bass instruments –– the register that usually carries the flow line that holds up the busier stuff on top. I thought it was time to give them some action –– a clumsy, fast-moving, hard-driving dance, like fat cows grooving. I wrote The Low Quartet for the low instruments of the world.


—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 Eight Parts:
Water (Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe)
1. My Soul (David Lang)
2. Water Instrumental (Heavy Water) (Michael Gordon)
3. He Saw a Skull (Michael Gordon)
4. Before Roll, Ocean (David Lang)
5. Give Me (David Lang)
6. Thirst (Julia Wolfe)
7. Roll, Ocean (David Lang)
8. Tephillat Geshem (Prayer for Rain) (Michael Gordon)

Composers' Note:
Water is a lover's tears, an unquenchable thirst, a fight for survival, a prayer for rain. Our piece Water is a meditation on the poetry of water: what it means to have it, how we misuse it, and how we struggle for it. Rain falls. Tears flow. A skull is found in a river. A man thirsts.

Water is an exploration through music, staging and projection of how dependent we are upon water in our world, and how uneasy our dependence really is. Much of our dependence is of course physical; at the same time, the hope for water, or the lack of it, can be a spiritual construct as well. Our piece explores the water we have and the water we need, the water we control and the water that controls us.

We have always lived with water in a kind of fragile equilibrium. We have too much. We have none. A rich man calls for ice in his water, next to a poor man who thirsts. It is a precarious balance, between blessing and curse, between life and death, between plenty and scarcity.

— Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe

In classical music, it is quite unusual for composers to collaborate, but it wasn't like that among Flemish Renaissance painters –– if the painter in the studio next door did better angels and you painted better flowers, it wasn't unusual for a collaboration to ensue. In my case, however, the requests for collaboration has often come from others, and Julia Wolfe, David Lang and I found ourselves embarking on our third collaborative piece in 2004, courtesy of the Cologne-based musikFabrik ensemble and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

Lost Objects is a musical exploration of the meaning of memory. With the spine of a baroque oratorio layered with the muscle of modern times, it is a powerful monument to the loss of people, things, rituals, ideas.

In their second major collaborative performance project, genre-defying composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe team up with polyphonic writer Deborah Artman to work a strange and beautiful alchemy of text and sound. The baroque virtuosity of the legendary Concerto Köln is challenged and stretched by the hard-edged electric Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble and the avant-turntables of DJ Spooky. In the same way that oratorios such as Handel's Messiah were intended to be staged, the 3 vocal soloists and 30 voice chorus of LOST OBJECTS inhabit a mythic and beautiful stage world, under the direction of the acclaimed, award-winning director François Girard (''32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,'' ''The Red Violin'').

The result is LOST OBJECTS, a haunting, hallucinatory and humane musictheater piece for baroque orchestra, rock ensemble (electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard and drums), live DJ remix, solo voices and choir. The unique weave of sounds combines the resonance of animal gut and wood with the ethereal blend of soprano and countertenor voices mixed with the edgy force of amplified rock instruments and drums. ''LOST OBJECTS is a prayer hall, a hymn but also an invention,'' writes Ms. Artman. ''There is a narrative, somewhat sacred, but it is a fractured meditation. In the tenuous and hurried climate of the times we live in now, LOST OBJECTS asks us to pause and consider the grace bestowed upon each thing, person, animal and idea, the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary lost objects of our shared and vanishing culture.''

Chaos was conceived and written with librettist Matthew Maguire. Loosely based on chaos theory, Chaos is a fast-paced, science-fiction opera in 25 short scenes for five singers and electronic made audio.

––Michael Gordon

Opera synopsis: Dr. Anna Fitzroy is a rogue physicist driven to research chaos. Dr. Lorenz Boleslaw is her partner whose own obsession with their experiment is nearly as great as their love for one another. Years of heartbreaking labor finally pay off when they penetrate to the heart of the Chaos Zone, where Marie and Pierre Curie appear as their navigators and reveal to them the secrets of chaos. Fitzroy and Boleslaw proudly report their results to their mentor, Dr. Aguabone, the head of the Institute of Science, a giant of Los Alamos, and a Nobel laureate in quantum physics.

Within the scientific world there has always been a battle between two forces: those fighting for and those against the evolution of science. Deeply threatened by chaos, Dr. Aguabone, while pretending to defend Fitzroy and Boleslaw, secretly arranges their arrest. They are promised ''freedom'' to work if they recant. Realizing Aguabone’s true nature, the scientists struggle with a moral dilemma that threatens to divide them. They escape from jail and, with Marie and Pierre's help, fight insanity, open a passage to the Chaos Zone, trap Aguabone, and broadcast his meltdown in Chaos on TV. All rejoice.
––Matthew Maguire

Cast/Characters:
Dr. Anna Lenehan, a rogue physicist driven to research Chaos.
Dr. Lorenz Boleslaw, her partner, whose own obsession with their experiment is nearly as great as their love for one another.
Dr. Marie Curie, who discovered radium with Pierre Curie. Brilliant and humble, she avoids personal gain. In the Poland of her youth she worked underground against the Czar and has remained intensely political. Still deeply in love with Pierre, she's now an inhabitant of the Zone of Chaos. Dressed in an old, acid-stained lab coat, she emanates a blue radioactive glow. In Chaos, she is thirty-six, the age at which she was awarded her first Nobel Prize.
Dr. Pierre Curie, the co-discoverer of radium. A brilliant but awkward man who lives in bliss with Marie in Chaos where he is eternally forty-four years old. Though less political than Marie, he was a Dreyfus supporter. Pierre feels that Marie is a superhuman being who has escaped human laws. He's dressed in nineteenth century, lab-worn, formal attire that also glows radioactively.
Dr. R. George Aguabone, Director of the National Institute of Science, one of the leading scientists to emerge from Los Alamos, a Nobel Laureate in quantum physics

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

[purgatorio] POPOPERA is a dance work created by Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten, the principal choreographers of the Amsterdam-based troupe, Emio Greco/PC. When I met Emio and Pieter in New York in 2000, I was taken by their thoughtful intensity. This attraction only grew when I saw their dance. Their work captures an other worldly energy that, when on the verge of cresting, just continues to get wilder and wilder.

We began then a long conversation about creating a new work together. I suggested that the dance company learn how to play electric guitars and perform the music I write for them as part of a new dance piece. Although Emio and Pieter had reservations about this, they were intrigued, and in the summer of 2005 I met the dance company at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and we began a 10-day workshop to see if it was even feasible to think that the dancers could learn how to play music.

In Massachusetts I was joined by Bryce Dessner and Katie Geissinger, who coached the dancers in guitar and voice, respectively. Bryce and I went to Guitar World in Albany, New York, and had the pleasure of buying eight new guitars. None of us, I think, were prepared for the intensity with which the dancers committed themselves to playing the guitar. The days consisted of long, grinding morning-to-evening sessions in which they rarely wanted to take a break and never seemed to tire. At the end of the 10 days. we gave a workshop performance to an invited audience and POPOPERA was born.

Over the next three years, I met repeatedly with the company, always in extreme workshop situations, and was assisted by Taylor Levine, who was their principal guitar coach throughout this period. Early in the process, I re-tuned the guitars, tuning the bottom three strings to F and the top three strings to E. This tuning created rich sonorities and allowed me to create dense harmonies. Between the summer of 2007 and the premiere in June 2008 at the Holland Festival, Levine and I met with the company for multi-week sessions in Italy, Amsterdam and again at Mass MOCA.

From the beginning, the dance company incorporated movement into the creation of the piece as well; after they learned a bit of music, they would then workshop the movement that would accompany that music. This whole thing might have seemed crazy to everyone involved in this project, but at a certain point it became clear that they were about to pull off something spectacular. All of a sudden they stopped being only dancers and also became musicians.
––Michael Gordon