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, with memory and time as 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 Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the choir of King’s College Cambridge, Huw Watkins, 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 British Composer Awards twice and the Prix Italia for radiophonic composition.
His two portrait discs – On Memory (NMC, 2009) and In the Middle of Things (Resonus Classics, 2019) – were both listed in The Times 100 Best Albums of the Year. 2022 saw the premiere of an evening-length chamber opera, Raising Icarus. Gordon has been active as a teacher of composition in higher education for many years in the UK and abroad.