News

Travel Guide to Nicaragua is premiered by The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser

November 4, 2022

[IMAGE] Travel Guide to Nicaragua

On November 16 in Philadelphia at Congregation Rudolph Shalom and November 17 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser (Donald Nally, conductor) premiere Michael Gordon’s new work Travel Guide to Nicaragua. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, Travel Guide to Nicaragua is written for The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser, with projections by Laurie Olinder and lighting by Eric Southern…

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Manchester Collective’s video premiere: Weather

October 17, 2022

Michael 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…

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Yarn/Wire reprises ‘Material’ at The Momentary in Arkansas

February 2, 2022

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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Decasia 20th Anniversary

November 4, 2021

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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8: new music for eight cellos recorded by Cello Octet Amsterdam

April 23, 2021

Michael 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…

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House Music premiere featured in NY Times

February 19, 2020

When a Critic Hosts the Premiere
[link to article]

Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020

“Please silence your cellphones.”

There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week…

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