Michael Gordon (composer)

Michael Gordon
Michael Gordon at Crater Lake
Born	(1956-07-20)July 20, 1956 Miami Beach, Florida
Nationality	American
Alma mater	New York University Yale University
Occupation	Composer, Professor of Music
Spouse(s)	Julia Wolfe (m. 1984)
Children	2
Website	michaelgordonmusic.com

Michael Gordon (born July 20, 1956) is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival.

Michael Gordon was born in Florida on July 20, 1956, and grew up in Nicaragua and on the outskirts of Managua in an Eastern European Jewish community before moving to Miami Beach at age eight.

Gordon's 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.

Gordon is one of the founders and artistic directors of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, alongside fellow composers Julia Wolfe—his wife—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 accompanies and interacts with the singers, and the frames fall away in the telling of the story. Gordon, Wolfe and Lang have subsequently collaborated on the 'oratorio' Lost Objects, the recording of which was released in summer 2001 (Teldec New Line).

A further project is Shelter, a multi-media work that was commissioned by the ensemble musikFabrik and features the Scandinavian vocalists Trio Mediaeval in a staged spectacle that, in the words of librettist Deborah Artman, "evokes the power and threat of nature, the soaring frontier promise contained in the framing of a new house, the pure aesthetic beauty of blueprints, the sweet architecture of sound and the uneasy vulnerability that underlies even the safety of our sleep." Shelter was premiered in Köln in Germany in spring 2005, and received its US premiere in November 2005.