Sunday July 24, at Caramoor Music Center in Katonah, NY, Michael Gordon’s Field of Vision is premiered by conductor Doug Perkins and the University of Michigan percussion ensemble along with So Percussion Summer Institute Fellows. The work continues up the East Coast to PS 21 in Chatham, NY on Monday July 25, then to North Adams, MA on July 29 for Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA…
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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…
Read More20 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…
Read MoreMichael Gordon
July
live.bangonacan.org
JULY 1 – 31
In spring of 2020, in isolation, I wrote a short piano piece every day. At the end of the day I would send the piece to the pianist Vicky Chow. On each day in July 2020, Vicky released the 31 piano works, one a day, on Instagram. Now in 2021 we are sharing July with an amazing array of pianists …
Read MoreMichael 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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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…
Read MoreThe Crossing choir (Donald Nally, conductor) premieres a beautifully filmed video (by Four/Ten Media) of “To The West”, one movement from Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison’s upcoming work Montaña — a project unfolding over the course of four years.
Each summer the artists meet in Big Sky, Montana to work on movements that will ultimately become a spatial work for a cappella choir and film…
Read Morelisten to the broadcast:
BBC Radio 3 The New Music Show’s Kate Molleson introduces the world premiere performance by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany of A Western Michael Gordon’s latest choral work, a nod to American cowboy movies where the town marshal meets the bad guys.
Read MoreOn May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presented three powerful City Symphonies by Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison, performed for the first time as a trilogy by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.
Gotham (2004) for New York, Dystopia (2008) for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente (2015) for Miami Beach celebrate the character of place and how it evolves, pairing image and music to share the energy, chaos and beauty of urban life…
Read MoreThe PBS documentary “Symphony for Nature” is broadcast nationwide tells the story of the premiere of Michael Gordon’s inspirational work Natural History for orchestra, chorus, and Native American drummers.
The full recording of Natural History has been released on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with the broadcast of the documentary. Click here to stream the full recording.
Gordon’s work, inspired by Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and commissioned by the Britt Orchestra as part of the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service, premiered the morning of July 29, 2016, on the rim of the lake with musicians spatially situated around the site…
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