Featuring limited edition packaging in a real wooden box with heat stamped cover design, Timber is composed by Michael Gordon, co-founder of Bang on a Can and Cantaloupe Music. Timber is an evening-length tour de force. Scored for six graduated wooden Simantras percussion instruments devised by French composer Iannis Xenakis the work brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level. In this new work, Gordon shapes the music in both polyrhythmic and dynamic waves of textures often each players' hands are in separate rhythmic 'worlds', each traversing a different dynamic contour from loud to soft to loud, similar in some respects to his solo for percussion, XY.

The Unchanging Sea is the latest collaboration in a long-running partnership between composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison. This is their fifth work for orchestra over the course of nearly two decades; starting with Decasia in 2001, the two developed a style that combined Gordon's haunting, hypnotic music with Morrison's artful manipulations of old, deteriorating film reels to craft a dreamlike experience that's by turns whimsical, nostalgic and inspiring. Co-commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony, The Unchanging Sea takes it direction from Gordon's electrified concerto for virtuoso pianist and multimedia artist Tomoko Mukaiyama. While the title and visual source material originate with a 1910 short film by silent era director D.W. Griffith, Morrison's film includes footage shot in Seattle in 1897, when the S.S. Willamette sailed out of Puget Sound loaded with 800 passengers and 300 horses headed for the Klondike, at the height of the Gold Rush. The album includes the companion piece Beijing Harmony, also performed by the Seattle Symphony. Inspired by a visit to the Echo Wall at Beijing's Temple of Heaven, Gordon "imagined that the sound would bounce off the stone floors and buildings to create a fanfare of echoes - an acoustical rebounding and ringing that would slowly grow in zeal and fierceness."

"• Commissioned by the New Music Bassoon Fund. • Seven-piece Rushes Ensemble features the top bassoonists in the U.S., including Dana Jessen. • Performances booked for March 2014 in Boston (3/26), Philadelphia (3/28) and Montclair, NJ (3/29), with more TBD. • Extensive three-month marketing, press and social media campaign. • Promotional videos currently posted on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=umhQdxwn26M) and Vimeo (vimeo.com/51771906). "

In his original program notes for Sonatra, composer Michael Gordon writes that he conceived of the piece for solo piano as a sideways tribute to Frank Sinatra, but with the sonata form as an equal and opposite force that tugs at the music from within. “I grew up playing, or mis-playing, the piano,” he notes. “When I started writing Sonatra, I decided that since I would probably only ever write one piano piece in my entire life, I wanted to use all the keys on the piano, and use them often. I constructed long chains or links of major and minor thirds that ceaselessly wind their way up and down the piano. Eventually they start cascading and intersperse with glissandos half the length of the keyboard, sounding to me like the performer has at least four hands." Sonatra is slightly more than 15 minutes in length, but when performed in both equal temperament and just intonation, as Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow has done for her singular recording of the piece, it takes on the aura and personality of a two-part epic.

When Michael Gordon's Timber, scored for six amplified wooden 2-by-4s, premiered in 2009, it brought the physicality and endurance of percussion performance to a new level. In the liner notes for Slagwerk Den Haag's recording of the piece, released on Cataloupe Music in 2011, Gordon described a connection to the work of shamanist author Carlos Castaneda, whose self-imposed spirit journey in the desert could wipe the brain clean and "bring on visions." Newly recorded by Mantra Percussion and reworked by an A-list of producers and DJs, Gordon's deep exploration into the extreme possibilities of rhythm gets the full electronic treatment on Timber Remixed. This album contains six key remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, Fennesz and Hauschka.

Dark Currents is the third full-length recording by Splinter Reeds, the West Coast's premier reed quintet featuring Kyle Bruckmann (English horn), Bill Kalinkos, Nicki Roman, Jeff Anderle (bass clarinet) and Dana Jessen. The album opens with Michael Gordon's majestic "Tall Grass," which cascades upwards into undulating waves of melody before spreading outward on a moody canvas that surges with tension and emotion. By contrast, Paula Mathussen's "Antenna Studies" combines ambient soundscapes and found sounds, while the musicians quietly tease their instruments with breath control and percussive pad strikes as a somber melodic figure gradually begins to take shape. Taken together, these two 20-minute performances propel the listener forward on an ever-changing journey, by turns hypnotic, ecstatic, surreal and spooky, that tests the pre-conceived boundaries of modern chamber music.

Precocious Addie Mills is smart and energetic, just like the mother she never knew. Addie has no idea why her father resents the holidays so intensely, refusing even to allow a Christmas tree in the house. But when she brings home a tree she won in a school contest, it paves the way for a miracle of sorts—her father’s broken soul is transformed. The House without a Christmas Tree, a new opera by Ricky Ian Gordon and Royce Vavrek that premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 2017, is based on the book by Gail Rock and the beloved 1972 television movie of the same name. Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1956 in Oceanside, NY) studied piano, composition and acting, at Carnegie Mellon University. After moving to New York City, he quickly emerged as a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr. Gordon’s songs have been performed and or recorded by such internationally renowned singers as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Judy Collins, Kelli O’Hara, Audra MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Andrea Marcovicci, and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, among many others. Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker) a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio). His opera “Angel’s Bone” with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The contact with Gordon Kampe's music is like - guided by suggestive sound impressions - the perception of an imaginary theater. Titelgebungen, set headlines and section names of his works refer for example to the world of cinematic science fiction designs � la "Star Trek" and "Alien". In other compositions, however, also quite different associations are conjured up. As "metaphors machines" used, indicate such designations the uncertainties of a pre-determined course, whose music filled time holds unexpected and unforeseen. A central compositional characteristic is the sudden turn, which manifests itself as an unusual action or instrumental solo and thus defies the common musical affect.

Formosa Seasons is based on a series of Haiku-like poems, and is dedicated to the celebrated Taiwanese-American violinistCho-Liang Lin.

Gordon Chin is one of Taiwan’s leading composers, and increasingly honored by commissions and performances from major ensembles in North America, Asia and Europe. Featuring an array of exotic Chinese percussion instruments, Symphony No. 3 ‘Taiwan’ is a dramatically powerful work cast in three movements that explore his native country’s turbulent history. Specific literary quotations from Shakespeare, Blaise Pascal and Samuel Johnson elucidate the expressive moods of the three-movement Cello Concerto No. 1.

Classical Music

Classical Music

With some notable exceptions, professional recorder players have largely ignored modern repertoire regarded as being too tonal, melodic or romantic.

Rakhi Singh is a violinist, music director, curator and composer based in the UK. In 2016 she co-founded Manchester Collective, a progressive group that the BBC describes as "transforming all our perceptions of what a classical music group can be."

"Sabkha" is the first single from Singh's full-length debut album Purnima (coming October 27) — a stirring stream-of-consciousness foray into signal processing and multi-tracking for violin, with Singh's own wordless vocals adding to the hypnotic mood. Purnima, which translates literally from the Sanskrit as "she who is the full moon,” is not only Singh's middle name — it's also a source of spiritual inspiration that has guided her own musical journey on her chosen instrument. Interpreting works by composers Alex Groves ("Trace I"), Emily Hall ("Outshifts"), Julia Wolfe ("LAD") and Michael Gordon ("Light Is Calling"), and augmenting them with unearthly electronic and electro-acoustic textures, Singh creates a haunting dreamworld of melody and sound that doesn't quite emit a completely "classical" aura — but instead suggests an altogether new one.

If there now exists a Second New York School to follow on from the first formed by Cage and his colleagues in the 1950s, then its members would surely comprise Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. This triumvirate has gone further than any in creating a heady polystylisiic mix combining elements of high and low, minimal and maximal, strict and improvised, global and local. Traces of both the polymetric language of totalism and the free-form eclecticism of Zorn may be heard in this music, allied with a post-Stravinskian style of rhythmic muscularity and high-velocity dissonance characteristic of maverick Dutch composer Louis Andriessen.

All of which leads on neatly to Gordon's latest release, a portrait opera of sorts, drawn using texts taken from proto-expressionist painter Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo. Gordon's predilection for suspending sustained vocal lines above pulsing, often visceral loops and patterns is certainly reminiscent of the Dutch minimalist, while his emphasis on developing two- or three-part textures from single lines evokes Frederic Rzewski.

But the most striking feature of this dark, desolate and often disturbing work is its manifold use of repetition as a means of evoking the kind of madness which so plagued van Gogh's life Like the Dutch artist's fragile mental condition, Gordon's music often appears to be on the edge of chaos but never quite looses control. Indeed, compared with earlier works (such as the wonderfully insane Sunshine ofyour Love) Gordon treats this harrowing subject with more than a modicum of restraint. One is often reminded in the music of van Gogh's arresting description, set towards the end of the work, of "a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat".

-- Gramophone [6/2008]