I always imagined that I would write music that would make people want to dance, a visceral sound, a sound that has a groove and would move people. I am fascinated by consonance and dissonance, how to take something accessible and rough it up with altered tunings, or doubling acoustic with electric instruments, or using the psychedelic tools of rock and roll, fuzz boxes and wah-wah pedals that create strange clouds of noise.

I think about the energy and power of heavy metal and the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Branca--how they all share the same concerns. Power, intensity, edgy rhythms. It's clear that my music does not come from just the western classical tradition, but it's also clear that I am trained in the western classical tradition. My impulse is to merge and synthesize. I don't want to be restricted by boundaries and I don't want the listener to be either.

My parents are Eastern European Jews who lived outside Managua, Nicaragua for 15 years, and this is where I was raised. We spoke English, Spanish and Yiddish in the house, and dinner was made up of rice and beans, kugel and meat loaf.

In Nicaragua I studied piano, and began writing music to distract my piano teacher from the fact that I hadn't practiced. As a teenager in Miami, I quit piano and joined a rock band and wrote songs. When I was a child, my father taught me math and chess, and we would work on finding solutions to logic puzzles. My first experience with the complex modern music of the 1950s and Œ60s was receiving a recording of music by Elliot Carter as a gift when I was 15, and I remember thinking: this is some amazing puzzle.

My quest to understand modern music lead me to study formally with Martin Bresnick at Yale. I spent 3 years playing a Japanese end-blown flute called the shakuhachi, took classes in Indian and African music and performed in underground rock bands, one of which--Peter and the Girlfriends--played New York clubs like CBGB's and Tier 3 in the early Œ80s when the scene was New Wave.

By 1983 I wanted to combine the joy and ferocity I experienced playing in rock bands with the formal training I had in music. I wanted to compose music for amplified instruments. With my own ensemble, Michael Gordon Philharmonic, I began experimenting with rhythm, piling rhythm on top of rhythm, looking for a jagged pulse and intense sound.

Commissions by other ensembles in the Œ90s opened up my musical palate and led me to try new things like splitting triplets, which seemed impossible at first and then totally natural. Lately I've been exploring the microtonal world, using samplers, guitars, tape and sound processing machines, retuning instruments, modifying the sound in one way or another.

­from an interview with Deborah Artman