Michael Gordon

Michael Gordon established the Bang on a Can festival for new music and has produced numerous expansive compositions, many developed through partnerships. Groups devoted to experimental sounds have presented his pieces in multiple countries.

Born July 20, 1956, in Miami Beach, Florida, Gordon spent part of his childhood in an Eastern European Jewish settlement near Managua, Nicaragua, before returning to Miami Beach at age eight.

The intersection of formal academic study and street-level popular music shaped his early training; he worked with composer Martin Bresnick at Yale University while performing in underground rock bands in New York, where he has lived ever since.

In 1983 he founded the Michael Gordon Philharmonic, which combined strings with rock instrumentation, and began drawing notice that year for Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!, written for clarinets, percussion, keyboard, electric guitar, violin, and viola.

With composers Julia Wolfe and David Lang he launched Bang on a Can in 1987; the three have remained the festival’s artistic directors.

His first solo album, Big Noise from Nicaragua, came out in 1994, the same year he composed the opera Chaos.

He has repeatedly collaborated with his wife Julia Wolfe and with David Lang, producing the 2001 video oratorio Lost Objects and the 2005 video oratorio Shelter.

Many of his projects involve joint work, including Decasia (2001), created with filmmaker Bill Morrison.

He has also received commissions from traditional orchestras; the New World Symphony requested the Miami Beach-themed El Sol Caliente to mark the city’s centennial, and the 2016 piano concerto The Unchanging Sea was written for pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and the Seattle Symphony.

Avant-garde ensembles on both sides of the Atlantic have maintained close working relationships with him, among them New York’s Ridge Theater and London’s Icebreaker.

In 2016 he became the first composer-in-residence with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

Further solo albums followed, and in 2023 he released Campaign Songs with the Kronos Quartet, an ensemble that has regularly programmed his music in concert.