Michael Zev Gordon

Michael Zev Gordon’s music has been described as ‘a clockmaker’s craftmanship [which] somehow coincides with Romantic phantasmagoria’ (Sunday Times). A broad range of influences — including his teachers Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen, Franco Donatoni, Louis Andriessen and John Woolrich — have coalesced into an eclectic, individual voice, in which tradition and the contemporary happily rub shoulders; memory and time have been recurring subjects.

Gordon has written for a wide range of genres, from opera and orchestral to chamber and choral. His works have been performed by many leading performers, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the Choir of King’s College Cambridge, Bozzini and Ligeti quartets, Nicholas Daniel, Alina Ibragimova, Richard Watkins and James Gilchrist. An important, occasional strand of his work has been to write for amateurs and children.

Gordon has won the choral category of the Ivors Classical (British Composer) Awards twice — the second of these for Allele, on the subject of genes. He was also awarded a Prix Italia for radiophonic composition for A Pebble in the Pond, written with the author Eva Hoffman, while two previous portrait albums — On Memory (NMC D144) and In the Middle of Things — were both in The Times ‘100 Best Albums of the Year’. An ongoing project of piano miniatures, called Diary Pieces, numbered close to a hundred pieces between 2015 and 2023. Such small-scale meditations continue to be complemented in the 2020s by the large-scale, including Raising Icarus, ‘a high-flying chamber opera that packs a punch’ (Guardian), and A Kind of Haunting for baritone, two speakers and strings, on the subject of inherited memory and the Holocaust.

Gordon has been active as a teacher of composition for many years in the UK and abroad; he is Professor of Composition at the University of Birmingham.