Michael Gordon has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Stuttgart Ballet, New World Symphony, National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, BBC Proms, and Holland Music Festival. His work has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Vocal works include Anonymous Man and Travel Guide to Nicaragua, both written for Donald Nally and The Crossing; and a series of works for the Young People’s Chorus of NYC, including Every Stop on the F Train. Gordon’s operas include Acquanetta about the 1940s B-movie starlet and What to wear—a collaboration with director Richard Foreman. His choral symphony Natural History was written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service and premiered at the rim of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. Natural History is also the subject of a PBS documentary, Symphony for Nature. A recent performance of Natural History by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was called one of the best classical performances of 2024 by The New York Times.
Gordon’s A Western is a virtuoso fantasy based on the 1950s film High Noon that starred Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It’s about the Wild West, the gun law, TV fantasies, and of course good guy versus bad guys.
Westerns. Good guys and bad guys. The lonely hero, he has a gun. Bang bang. They are shooting each other. As a boy, I loved westerns—the heroes, the legends and lore. In this classic black-and-white 1952 western, a sheriff tries unsuccessfully to rally support to face down a band of killer outlaws. Standing as an allegory for McCarthyism, High Noon won Oscars, but the screenwriter was blacklisted and never worked in Hollywood again. In this musing and meditation on a western, I take side trips into my own childhood; I set a 1958 television commercial for a cap pistol with the chilling line “every boy will stand tall when he wears a holster and pistol with the American brand.” I delve into the iconic late–19th-century weapon, the Colt 1873 Single Action Army Revolver, also known as “The Peacemaker.”
—Michael Gordon
John Luther Adams is a composer whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. It was in Alaska that he composed the orchestral work Become Ocean, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, gaining him international recognition and establishing him as a unique voice in American music.
His love of nature, concern for the environment, and interest in the resonance of specific places led him to pursue the concept of sonic geography, which is a process of reinterpreting place by drawing connections between location, imagination, and performance. This includes traversing and documenting the sonic properties of a landscape, as well as creating abstract soundwalks and maps where significant objects warp the surrounding environment. The composer has stated, “My music is born in solitude. The work of composing is slow. It takes long stretches of uninterrupted time when I am as far removed as I can be from emails, phone calls, meetings, and social engagements. My work calls me to live as close as I can to the Earth, which is the ultimate source for everything I do.”
Adams’s A Brief Descent into Deep Time is a procession through the performance space and metaphorically through 1.7 billion years of descent through the geologic layers of the Grand Canyon. The text is derived from the names of the geologic eons, eras, and periods, and their times before the present (in billions and millions of years), as well as major events in the history of the earth—including the previous period of rapid global warming and the five previous mass extinctions. At this time scale (2.5 million years per second!), human history won’t even register, but we may hear the word humanity as a grace note to the final high C, struck on a crotale.
I’ve been busy following the rocks deeper into the canyon. Yesterday I passed the one-billion-year mark. The colors of the rocks and the beauty of their names have carried me away, perhaps too far. I’m a little concerned that this thing may be too beautiful. But, as always, it’s a journey of fascination, even obsession. I’m no longer in command, and all I can do is follow wherever it may lead … For now, the descent continues.
—John Luther Adams
Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them.
Wolfe’s recent works include Pretty (premiered in 2023 by the Berliner Philharmoniker), embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock ‘n’ roll; unEarth (premiered in 2023 by the New York Philharmonic and Theatre of Voices’ Else Torpe), a large-scale work for orchestra, men’s chorus, and children’s choir that addresses the climate crisis; Her Story (premiered in 2022 by the Nashville Symphony and Lorelei vocal ensemble with stage direction by Anne Kauffman), a semi-staged work that invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation in America; Flower Power (premiered in 2020 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Bang on a Can All-Stars), drawing on the political and artistic time of the late 1960s, harnessing the energy and power of liberation and activism; and Fire in my mouth (premiered in 2019 by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of NYC), addressing the plight of young immigrant women working in New York City’s garment industry at the turn of the century.
In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Wolfe is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. She is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can and is artistic director of NYU Steinhardt’s Music Composition program.
For Italian Lesson, written especially for Theatre of Voices, I set the poem (of the same name) by contemporary poet Cynthia Zarin. For texts in my other compositions, words have mostly been drawn from “literal” sources—speeches, newspaper articles, oral histories, lists of names, etc. But as I was considering what might be special for the transcendent sound of Theatre of Voices, I came across the poem “Italian Lesson,” printed in a recent copy of The New Yorker. There it was—this joyful thing, full of wonder and awe, and half in Italian (which I studied when I first moved to New York). The words are clear and direct—so in some ways not so different from my literal texts, but in other ways completely different. I thought about how the English and Italian suggest different rhythms, speeds, and colors. I added small sound-making objects and expressive gestures to the piece. After all, the group’s name is “Theatre” of Voices. The piece, like the poem, traverses across different terrains, images, sensibilities. Sometimes I meditate on single phrases, other times the words and pitches develop into sonic textures and grooves. While the theater and clarity in the composition Italian Lesson relate to my recent large-scale oratorios, the intimacy of the ensemble, the members’ ethereal voices, and the poetry took me to fun, new, and unexpected worlds.
—Julia Wolfe
Cynthia Zarin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Next Day: New and Selected Poems, as well as five books for children and two essay collections: Two Cities and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History. Her debut novel, Inverno, was published last year; her second, Estate, will be released this fall. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her collaborations include work with composers Eric Schorr, Massimo Nunzi, and Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and choreographer Troy Schumacher of BalletCollective. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she teaches at Yale University.