I'm Wagner's ultimate musical bogeyman

If the subject matter sounds daunting, Gordon is at pains to make it less so. Spinoza, a Dutch Jew, was excommunicated by his Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656, when he was only 23 years old, denounced for expressing doubts about the divine nature of Judaism. Somewhat shockingly, even as recently as 2015 when attempts were made to rescind the “cherem”, or deed of excommunication, the Amsterdam community refused. Spinoza himself never asked for the cherem to be revoked, and died, aged only 44, to be buried in a Christian churchyard in The Hague.

The amiable Gordon alighted on Spinoza for complex reasons — to which we shall return. He was born and brought up in Wimbledon, the child of a marriage between his mother, whose family came from Galicia at the end of the 19th century — and had been living in Stoke Newington — and his father, a Polish Jew who came to Britain to study in 1939, “and got caught here”. So the composer’s upbringing, he says, was “established British Jewry on the one side, and Polish Jewish immigration on the other”. Many of his father’s family perished in the Holocaust; those who survived left Poland for either America or Israel.

The major musical influence, he says, was his maternal grandmother, who had “a great love of classical music. I played the piano with her when I was growing up. I realise, looking back, that the musicians we talked about [in the family] were mainly Jewish musicians, people like Rubenstein and Heifetz, the Amadeus String Quartet, Perlman…”

Gordon has two older sisters, one of whom, he says, was musical and played the clarinet and the piano. The family were members of Wimbledon Reform Synagogue and, looking back on his time spent in synagogue services as a young boy and teenager, Gordon recognises some of the influences of the synagogue’s organ music, which fleetingly crop up in his own compositions.

At school — King’s College School in Wimbledon — there was “a very good music department”. Gordon took up the oboe, playing in school and youth orchestras before going to Cambridge, where he did a music degree. “From about 16, I’d started composing, and by the end of my university days I’d shifted towards composing, rather than playing the oboe. Then I went to Guildhall where I did a post-graduate degree in composition”.

He speaks slightly wistfully of his oboe-playing days: “Yes, you could say I abandoned the oboe. But I didn’t stop playing it altogether — in fact in the Progressive Jewish community that I’m part of now [Crouch End Chavurah], I played the opening Kol Nidre prayer on the oboe”.

To compose, however, Gordon uses a piano — and a computer. “But the piano is a necessity”.

Though his principal passion is Western classical music, Gordon frequently adds whispers of other influences — from jazz to Middle Eastern music, and even klezmer. In fact, he has written a number of Jewish-influenced pieces, from Three Rabbinical Sayings to Song based on the Song of Songs. One of his hallmarks, he says, is “quotation from existing pieces of music, fragments of memory that come back to you and then disappear”.

He uses this technique in his Spinoza song cycle, too. The fifth song relates to a Spinoza “poetic proposition” about memory. “What I have woven into that song is some basic cantillation patterns… I imagine Spinoza might have heard such notes”.

He hesitates when asked if he thinks of himself as a Jewish composer, or a composer who happens to be Jewish. “I don’t write klezmer music all the time: but I do touch on this music, which matters greatly to me, which is part of my identity, the flavour of it comes and goes. I’m an English Jewish composer, that’s what I am. But I wouldn’t want to be limited by being labelled either English or Jewish”.

Nevertheless, he looks mildly caught in the cross-hairs when I say that he is making quite a statement by billing himself as Michael Zev Gordon. That middle name tells listeners that with English Michael, you also get Jewish Zev. “I am quite overtly making a declaration with my name. That’s who I am and where I come from”.

The Spinoza songs are an example, he says, of that conflict over identity and origin which partly drew Gordon to the philosopher. “I speculate, entirely without any proof, that even though Spinoza was excommunicated by the community, that being a Jew was still somewhere inside him”.

And since names plainly matter to him, he made a very specific choice to call his piece Baruch — Spinoza’s Jewish name — rather than “Benedict”, the name by which he became known to his 17th century contemporaries. “I was drawn to the poetry of Spinoza’s aphorisms — and they leave room for the music”.

For an atheist, Gordon observes, “Spinoza seems to write a lot about God. His writings are very mystical and include what he calls ‘the third kind of knowledge’, which leads to ‘the highest possible peace of mind’”. It may not be the Divine as conventionally expressed, but it probably runs it close, thinks Gordon.

Though he describes the world of contemporary classical music in Britain as “tiny”, Gordon, who teaches composition at Birmingham University, says “there’s probably more of us than you think.” He adds “you can’t teach someone to be inspired or imaginative, but you can teach the nuts and bolts of the craftsmanship of composition”.

He has honed and polished his talent over the years before becoming one of the most feted of our composers. His music is open and accessible — to those who have ears to listen.