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Artist
Michael Gordon
12+ albums
contemporary classicalexperimentaltotalisminstrumentalcomposer
about
Michael Gordon is a contemporary American composer who was born in Florida in 1956 and grew up in Nicaragua and an Eastern European community in a jungle on the outskirts of Managua. His music is an outgrowth of his experience with underground rock bands in New York City and his formal training in composition at Yale where he studied with Martin Bresnick. Tuneful, rhythmic and raw, Gordon has embraced elements of dissonance, minimalism, modality and popular culture in what has been considered by some people as a bold and direct sound. Since 1991 he has worked extensively with video. His work Van Gogh Video Opera, a collaboration with video-artist Elliott Caplan, was premiered to critical acclaim in New York in 1991 and received its European premiere in Vienna in 1992. Other works with Caplan include Grand Dairy, based on a diner on New York's Lower East Side, which was produced in Vienna in 1996 and Weather (German Tour 1997), in which the 16 string players of Ensemble Resonanz perform on a vertical stage surrounded by video panels. The recording of Weather is available on Arthrob/Nonesuch. Gordon is one of the founders and artistic directors of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, alongside fellow composers Julia Wolfe and David Lang. He has collaborated with them on several projects. The opera The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, received the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work, a projected comic strip accompani
