Ricky Ian Gordon often takes long walks around New York City, headphones over his ears. Since he is a critically acclaimed composer, one would assume he is
listening to music - either his own, or someone else's. But the tape in his Walkman is much more likely to feature the work of Dorothy Parker than Charlie Parker.
"Words and poetry were my first love, before music," Gordon said in a telephone interview. "When I was a little boy, my older sister Susan put me to sleep by reading poems to me. I learned to associate poems with comfort and serenity. They became the thing that I went to in order to understand my universe.” "A lot of times, I don't have the words to sort out this experience called life. But poems do."

Given this attitude, it is not surprising to learn that Gordon's songs tend to be settings of poems. Gordon, 45, has yet to write a hit Broadway show, and he isn't sure if that will ever happen. But he is a busy, respected composer whose works "blithely blur the line between art song and the high-end Broadway of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim," according to Stephen Holden. The New York Times critic went on to call Gordon's sophisticated songs "caviar for a world gorging on pizza."

Holden was reviewing an all-Gordon concert that took place at Lincoln Center in March. It featured noted singers from both Broadway (Kristen Chenoweth) and the classical world (Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), as well as McDonald, a Music Academy alumnus and rising opera star. "In 1996, my lover Jeffrey passed away," he noted. "In a way, I've been working
out grief since then. Coming to 'The Widow's Lament in Springtime,' I have this feeling it's going to be the last thing I write about grief for a while. It's so real and honest. The song is more like an aria."

As is often the case for Gordon, the process of writing the song began with "memorizing the poem and kind of living with it. It's like I install the poem (within me), and then I slowly allow it to dress itself with music. "Sometimes I will tape a poem to my piano. It'll be sitting there for a year. Then
I'll be in the shower, and the whole thing will come to me. I'll have to turn off the shower, wipe myself off and run to the piano. Other times I look at a poem and I hear the music as I'm reading it for the first time. " 'The Widow's Lament in Springtime' took a little longer (than most)," he said. "Langston Hughes' poems are like lyrics. It's different
when a piece of writing is prosier. 'The Widow's Lament in Springtime' is like a little opera; each of the beats has to be really clear as the poem shifts tone. You have to find the music for each of them, and it can't be the same music.
"This poem is so much about grief. Grief is about waves. So (in setting it to music) you have to create different waves."

Gordon has been making waves, in one way or another, for most of his life. The youngest member of the family profiled in the 1991 Long Island. "All three of my sisters took piano lessons, and my mother - a retired Borscht-belt entertainer - sang," he recalled. "I started playing by ear everything my sisters were studying." His first major epiphany occurred at age 8 or 9, when he took a volume off his piano teacher's
shelf. It was "The Victor Book of the Opera." I remember looking at this book and feeling as though my head was surrounded by light," he said. "I became so obsessed with that book - I couldn't put it down - that Miss Fox (the teacher) gave it to me."

Along with a couple of close friends, Gordon began going to the opera virtually every week. "We would get standing-room tickets to the Met or the City Opera," he recalled. "We'd write letters to opera stars, who would put us on their guest lists." But his musical interests were not limited to Verdi and Wagner. One of his sisters, a journalist, happened to interview a young singer-songwriter named Joni Mitchell. She introduced her brother to Mitchell's music, and he quickly became a huge fan. Today, he credits Mitchell with inspiring him to start writing songs. "In seventh grade, I gave my first concert of songs," he said. "I made my mark with anti-war
songs like, 'Oh, I Wish I Were a Dove' and 'Black Thorn to Hell.'"

While he continued writing in high school, "I still was not a serious composer," he said. "I got into Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist. "After one semester, I really knew something was wrong. I was never interested in learning a piece (to the point where) I could play it. I only wanted to move through music. I found myself more interested in what composers were doing (than learning how to actually play). It suddenly occurred to me, 'I think I'm a composer.'" At that moment, "I walked into my own power," he said. "I immediately got into the composition department, and I started writing almost every day of my life. I really found what I was supposed to do with my time."

Gordon's first big break came in 1989, when he met composer Adam Guettel, the grandson of Richard Rodgers. "I was already friends with (singer) Theresa McCarthy, and she wanted to record a bunch of my songs - to make a demo," Gordon recalled. "She said, 'Let's go to my friend Adam's house and we'll record them.' Adam has one of the biggest and most beautiful lofts in New York, in which he also has this incredible recording studio. So Adam heard my music, and he was really kind. "He said, 'I'm about do to a big benefit here in this loft for the gay men's health crisis. I'd like to present four composers, and I'd like you to be one of them.' I was really flattered. I had just written a song cycle for a soprano named Patricia Schumann, who was singing at the Met at the
time. Pat agreed to do it with me. "After we did our song cycle, people like Mary Rodgers (Adam's mother) and Sheldon Harnick (of 'Fiddler on the Roof' fame) came up to me and said, 'Who are you? Where have you been?' I didn't want to say, 'I've been having a lot of indiscriminate sex, drinking and taking drugs.' So I just said, 'I've been in hiding. I'm emerging.' "About two weeks later, Mary had me over. I played for her for about four hours. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I'm at Mary Rodgers' house, playing on her father's piano, underneath all the set designs that decorate the living room. It so shook me up that I ran out of her house afterward to call my parents."

Things moved quickly after that. Gordon received a publishing contract from the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization. He won a couple of major awards. "Suddenly people started knowing about me and singing my music," he said. "Another real turning point was when Audra McDonald did her first CD, 'Way Back to Paradise.' That CD (featuring works by emerging composers, such as Gordon and Guettel) sold really well.
Audra started doing concerts all over the country. She was singing my music everywhere."

The Lobero concert will feature Music Academy alumnus Monique McDonald - no relation, but another singer Gordon admires. He first heard her when composer Ned Rorem, "a friend and a neighbor," invited him to attend his lover's memorial service. "Monique, whom I didn't know, got up and sang -absolutely beautifully," Gordon said. "I thought, 'That woman has a beautiful voice, and a beautiful presence.'" Some months later, "We were holding auditions for my (off-Broadway) show 'Only Heaven,' and this woman walked in. I knew she looked familiar. She came in and sang (an aria) from 'Manon Lescaut' - and absolutely galvanized us." Gordon cast McDonald not only in that show, but also in the aforementioned Lincoln Center concert. "It was an incredible group of singers, many of them really well known," he said. "Monique more than held her own. It was a pretty cool night for her. "When she called me and asked if I would come to
Santa Barbara and do this affair, I barely had to think about it. I just said 'yes.' I think people are going to hear a lot more about her."

The same is surely true of Gordon. But it appears likely that his music will be heard in opera houses rather than on a Broadway stage. "Doing a really successful piece for Broadway is a real desire of mine," he said. "But whether I'm going to meet the right writers and come up with the right piece for that arena remains to be seen." He fully realizes that the sort of complex music he writes isn't currently in vogue among
Broadway producers. "When Stephen Sondheim was (writing hit shows), many of us writers in New York thought it was a trend," he said. "We were wrong. It was an aberration. Consequently, the only place for us to go at the moment is to the opera houses. "I'm not bemoaning my fate with that. I'm a lucky man, because it happens to be a moment when opera houses are interested in the evolution of new works. I got to write an opera for Houston Grand Opera, 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead.' I'm now writing for the Lyric (in Chicago). The Minnesota Opera wants me to write 'The Grapes of Wrath.'
Speight Jenkins (of the Seattle Opera) got the rights to a Truffaut movie for me. So I feel that I'm really going to get to do what I do."

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