Michael Gordon is a contemporary American composer who was born in Florida in 1956 and grew up in Nicaragua and an Eastern European community in a jungle on the outskirts of Managua. His music is an outgrowth of his experience with underground rock bands in New York City and his formal training in composition at Yale where he studied with Martin Bresnick. Tuneful, rhythmic and raw, Gordon has embraced elements of dissonance, minimalism, modality and popular culture in what has been considered by some people as a bold and direct sound.