News

Decasia 20th Anniversary

November 4, 2021

20 years ago, just a few months after the world-changing events of 9/11, Michael Gordon traveled to Switzerland to see the Basel Sinfonietta and conductor Kasper de Roo premiere his concert-length work for orchestra, Decasia, which accompanied a film by Bill Morrison — now itself a cult classic that is studied in film schools around the world.

View the score, watch film excerpt, and listen to complete work, click here

“The music’s purely visceral power [is] hard to resist.” — The New York Times

“…its incessant pulses – by turns buoyant and threatening – support a sound world in which the amplified instruments, carefully tuned microtones apart, create layers of fiercely dissonant harmony, punctuated by beats and difference tones.” — The Guardian, UK

It’s a voiceless opera about nothing, a composition on decomposition. The mystery is that study of oblivion can be so raucous and so much fun.” — Newsday