concert-length experimental music
for festivals
This mesmerizing music for eight amplified cellos drives minimalism straight through the 21st century. The music, while full of repeating pulses and phrases, spins on a perpetual axis that — as it turns — reveals new landscapes and formations of melody and timbre. As the listener floats above this orbiting body, their existential self discovers a vibrancy and a life inside music they may never have realized before.
8
for cellos
This epic outdoor music for a dazzling ecosystem of percussion (brake drums, gongs, bass drums, bell plates, wood, stones, metals) is truly like no other music we know of. The audience intermingles with the musicians in a ceremony of sound; together inhabiting an undiscovered world. The journey is the point. The music transcends into the sky and the rhythms excite the air we breathe.
Field of Vision
for 36 percussionists
This kaleidoscopic music for six amplified planks of wood exhales waves of polyrhythmic timbres, like a sonic storm over roiling seas. The ever-shifting harmonics (born deep inside the planks of wood) hover, dance, and shimmer above the ocean of sound, as if the Aurora Borealis were music. The listener — engulfed within these waves and musical light — loses their sense of time, floating freely in the music.
Timber
for six 2x4s
Music for Multiples
This is music for listening as you would in nature: the sonic din of the landscape transports you; your mind slows — its wandering is replaced by sound. You experience the entirety of the moment as it surrounds you.
These concert-length instrumental works — each written by composer Michael Gordon (a leading figure in contemporary classical music, and co-founder of New York City’s Bang on a Can collective) — blur the lines between traditional and experimental music. The music is, in many ways, like architectural sound — almost a physical presence that appears to shift, swirl, rotate, stretch, increase and decrease like an object or an ecosystem; it seems to have neither a beginning nor an ending, as if one could start anywhere at any moment.
Presenting this music gives listeners something they have likely never heard; perhaps something they hadn’t imagined could be music, though it is cellos, percussion, stones, metal, and branches.
For adventurous music festivals, this music is exactly what makes an experience so unique and memorable — something people travel to experience; something they talk about; and something that takes them home with a changed perspective or a new appreciation for what music can be.
Please let us know how this music might fit on your festival
Michael Gordon is known for his monumental and immersive works: Decasia, for 55 retuned spatially positioned instruments, performed live with Bill Morrison’s accompanying cult-classic film; Timber, a tour-de-force for percussion sextet played on amplified planks of wood has been performed on every continent; Natural History, a collaboration with the Steiger Butte Drum of Oregon’s Klamath tribe, was premiered on the rim of Crater Lake and is the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Gordon’s vocal works include Travel Guide to Nicaragua, an autobiographical choral work; the opera What to wear with the legendary director Richard Foreman; and the film-opera Acquanetta with director Daniel Fish. Recent recordings include Clouded Yellow, Gordon’s complete string quartets performed by the Kronos Quartet.