Composers' Workshop: Michael Zev Gordon

Michael Zev Gordon’s music has been described as ‘a clockmaker’s craftmanship [which] somehow coincides with romantic phantasmagoria’ (Paul Driver, Sunday Times). A broad range of influences – including his teachers Holloway, Goehr, Knussen, Donatoni, Andriessen and Woolrich – have coalesced into an eclectic, individual voice, in which tradition and modernism happily rub shoulders; memory and time have been recurring subjects. Gordon has written for a wide range of genres, and his works have been performed by many leading performers, including the BBC Symphony and Scottish Symphony Orchestras, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the choir of King’s College Cambridge, Huw Watkins, Nicholas Daniel, Alina Ibragimova, Richard Watkins, Toby Spence and James Gilchrist.  He has won the choral category of the British Composer Awards twice, while two portrait discs – On Memory in 2009 on NMC and In the Middle of Things in 2019 on Resonus Classics – were both listed in The Times 100 Best Albums of the Year. Dramatic works of diverse kinds recur in Gordon’s output. Of particular note are Red Sea for choir and wind instruments, placing Hebrew and Arabic texts together; and the radiophonic A Pebble in the Pond, written with the author Eva Hoffman, which won a Prix Italia for best radio music composition. April 2022 saw the première of Raising Icarus, Gordon’s first full length opera. He has been active as a teacher of composition for many years in the UK and abroad; Gordon is Professor of Composition at the University of Birmingham.