Michael Gordon (composer)

Michael Gordon (born July 20, 1956) is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua. Life and career Michael Gordon was born in Miami Beach, Florida on July 20, 1956. He grew up in Nicaragua on the outskirts of Managua in an Eastern European Jewish community before moving back 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. He is based in New York City. Bang on a Can 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 subsequently collaborated with librettist Deborah Artman on the ‘oratorio’ Lost Objects, the