Michael Gordon is known for his monumental and immersive works. Decasia, for 55 retuned spatially positioned instruments (with Bill Morrison’s accompanying cult-classic film) has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival and at the Southbank Centre. Timber, a tour de force for percussion sextet played on amplified microtonal semantras, has been performed on every continent. Natural History, a collaboration with the Steiger Butte Drum of the Klamath tribe, was premiered by the Britt Festival Orchestra and Chorus on the rim of Crater Lake (Oregon) by conductor Teddy Abrams and is the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Gordon’s vocal works include Anonymous Man, an autobiographical choral work for The Crossing; the opera What to Wear with legendary director Richard Foreman; and the film-opera Acquanetta with director Daniel Fish. Recent recordings include Clouded Yellow, Gordon’s complete string quartets performed by Kronos Quartet.
My father, an emigrant from Poland who was not a particularly religious man, turned to me one day and quoted the opening of Genesis 12:1, (Lech Lecha) “Go out from your land, your people, your father’s house.” He said, “That’s the story of my life.” I realized that my father was sharing the beginning of my family’s journey, from the Old Country to the Americas.
No one knows exactly the circumstances surrounding my grandfather’s departure from Dzyatlava (Zdzieciol in Polish, Zhetl in Yiddish) to Cuba in the early 1920s. The various accounts include that he abandoned his family in search of a different life, that he was gassed in World War I and lost a sense of himself, and/or that he got himself into some kind of trouble. It was possible at that time to get a visa to Cuba. Also, there is no clear explanation as to why, in 1927, my father’s mother, Goldie, chased after her husband to Cuba, and why she left one child, my father, back behind in Poland. In Travel Guide to Nicaragua there are different streams of information that are hazy, even contradictory, and very little is conclusive.
Travel Guide to Nicaragua was to premiere on March 25, 2020. That performance was postponed, as concert halls around the world closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In isolation with my family, I took time to rethink the piece. Things were missing. I began to focus on the shoebox that served as a container for the remnants of my father’s former life: old photographs of friends and family from his town Dzyatlava, World War II medals and documents from when he served in the Philippines, and small trinkets. Everyone in the photographs had been killed by the Nazis. That memory, ever present, loomed silently over my childhood home, like an invisible bird hovering overhead. Also missing at that time from Travel Guide was my chance meeting with a survivor from my father’s town, a woman who at age 16 fled into the surrounding woods when the Nazis began shooting. She brought that hovering bird into a clearer reality.
None of this has been easy to write. Like my father, I put past events in a box somewhere deep in my memory and moved on. My father rarely spoke about his past. He never complained. He moved through life with good humor, with an upbeat disposition. His memories stayed in the shoebox.
Throughout Travel Guide to Nicaragua, only my grandmother Goldie has been called by name. Everyone else is referred to as father’s father, sister, brother, cousin, relative, and so forth. I left out specific names because this story is just one of so many stories of immigration and displacement.
This work is written for The Crossing led by Donald Nally and for cellist Maya Beiser. My first work for The Crossing, Anonymous Man, is also autobiographical. It tells the story of living on my block on Desbrosses Street in Lower Manhattan, and my interaction there with two men who lived outside on the street. For both Anonymous Man and Travel Guide to Nicaragua, the vocal music is inspired by the great artistry of this ensemble. Travel Guide to Nicaragua continues my long musical collaboration with the spectacular Maya Beiser, a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, for whom I have written two solo works: Industry and All Vows.
—Michael Gordon