Michael Gordon
Composer 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 at 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 simantras has been performed on every continent, including by Slagwerk Den Haag at the Muziekgebouw and Mantra Percussion at BAM. 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 the 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 the Kronos Quartet.

Doug Perkins
A percussionist, producer, and conductor who has been declared a “percussion virtuoso” by the New York Times, Doug Perkins has appeared at venues of all types including Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Center, and the Alaskan Tundra. Doug has commissioned and premiered myriad works from such composers as John Luther Adams, Tristan Perich, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Paul Lansky, Roshanne Etezady, Christian Wolff, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Steve Reich. He founded the percussion quartet Sō Percussion, the Meehan/Perkins Duo, and performs regularly with Ensemble Signal. Perkins’ recordings as a performer, conductor, and producer, appear on the Bridge, Cantaloupe, Harmonia Mundi, New Focus, New World, and Nonesuch labels. His most recent recording of Tristan Perich’s Drift Multiply made 2020 “Best Of” lists of The New York Times, NPR, PopMatters, and Bandcamp. Organizing large-scale outdoor musical events that encourage new ways of experiencing live music has been central to Perkins’ work in the last decade. He brought Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa to Central Park Lake and the music of John Luther Adams everywhere from Lincoln Center and Caramoor, to the shores of California and the peaks of the Italian Alps. Alex Ross called Perkins’ production of Inukuit at the Park Avenue Armory, “one of the most rapturous listening experiences of my life.” Perkins is Associate Professor of Percussion/Director of Percussion at the University of Michigan. He previously taught at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and Dartmouth College.

The University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble (Ian Antonio and Doug Perkins, Directors) is committed to providing its members opportunities to grow as artists through collaboration and performance. In the last two seasons, the ensemble has collaborated on projects with the Limón Dance Company, Shodekeh Talifero, as well as incubating new projects from its own members. Our Modern Percussion Lab recently put out a record called A New Age for New Age volume 5 and recorded John Luther Adams’ Sila: The Breath of the World for release on Cantaloupe Music in September 2022.