News — Michael Gordon

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…

July: 20 pianists perform 31 solos…. one each day of July.

July 1, 2021

Michael 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 …

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…

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…

To The West — video premiere

November 19, 2019

The 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…

BBC Radio 3 New Music Show features world premiere of A Western

September 24, 2019

listen 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.

premiere performance: City Symphonies trilogy

June 10, 2019

On 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…

Natural History: PBS doc “Symphony for Nature”

March 6, 2018

The 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…

Acquanetta premieres at Prototype, Jan 9-14

January 12, 2018

NYT Review: A B-Movie Starlet Becomes an Opera Diva in ‘Acquanetta’

By Seth Colter Walls
January 10, 2018

A large screen looms over the stage. Projected onto it is a black-and-white close-up on an eyeball, fluttering in a state of nervous distress.

An overture, powered by distorted electric guitar and staccato strings, accompanies this sooty B-movie-style image. A choir grasps toward high-pitched wails…

Prototype Festival premieres Acquanetta in a new version

October 5, 2017

From January 9 – 14, the Prototype Festival presents a new, commissioned, chamber version of Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Based on a 1940’s B-movie horror flick called Captive Wild Woman, starring an enigmatic actress and former cheesecake model named Acquanetta, the opera’s libretto is written by Deborah Artman.

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…