The founder of the Bang on a Can new music event, composer Michael Gordon has written many large works of his own, many of a collaborative nature. His works have been performed by avant-garde musical ensembles in several countries. Gordon was born in Miami Beach, Florida, on July 20, 1956. He grew up partly in Nicaragua, in an Eastern European Jewish community near the capital of Managua, returning to Miami Beach at eight. A formative part of Gordon’s musical education involved the collision between academic musical traditions and vernacular music; he studied at Yale University with composer Martin Bresnick and also played in underground rock bands in New York, where he has continued to live. In 1983, Gordon formed the Michael Gordon Philharmonic, which added strings to rock band instrumentation, and in that year, he first began to gain attention for such compositions as Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! for clarinets, percussion, keyboard, electric guitar, violin, and viola. Gordon co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987 with composers Julia Wolfe and David Lang; the three remain the festival’s artistic directors. In 1994, Gordon released his first solo album, Big Noise from Nicaragua, and that year, he composed the opera Chaos. He went on to collaborate with Wolfe (to whom he is married) and Lang on the 2001 video oratorio Lost Objects and another video oratorio, Shelter (2005). Collaboration has marked many of Gordon’s works, including Decasia (2001), made with filmmaker Bill Morrison. He has worked with conventional symphony orchestras; his Miami Beach-themed El Sol Caliente was commissioned by the New World Symphony to mark the city’s 100th anniversary, and his 2016 piano concerto The Unchanging Sea was written for pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and the Seattle Symphony. He has also worked closely with avant-garde groups on both sides of the Atlantic, including New York’s Ridge Theater and London’s Icebreaker. In 2016, he became composer-in-residence with the Young People's Chorus of New York City, the group’s first ever. Gordon issued several more solo albums, and in 2023, he released the album Campaign Songs with the Kronos Quartet, which has frequently featured his works in concert. ~ James Manheim