Daniel Gordon is a Professor of Music at Plattsburgh State University of NY, where he teaches studio saxophone, directs the Symphonic Band, and teaches a variety of classroom courses. As a performer, he appears regularly both regionally and abroad. Regionally, he performs with Metamusic, a chamber ensemble that he formed with violinist Marilyn Reynolds and pianist Rose Chancler, as well as with the Frontier Saxophone Quartet, which he founded with performers from the Plattsburgh region and Montreal. Abroad, Gordon has taught and performed in residency at the Suomen Työväen Musiikkiliitto International Summer Music Festival in Finland since 2005 and was a part of the saxophone teaching corps at the Domaine Forget International Music Festival in northern Quebec for summer residencies from 1997-99.
Equally active as a conductor, Gordon has served as director of the McGill University Wind Symphony and the Adirondack Youth Orchestra, and is founder, President, and Director of the Adirondack Wind Ensemble (AWE), a professional group consisting primarily of music educators from around the North Country. AWE has performed multiple times at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts under his directorship.
Gordon’s other performing credits include appearances at Alice Tully Hall and Bruno Walter Auditorium at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; the American Embassy in Paris; the Circle of Fine Arts in Madrid; Kuhmo Chamber Music Hall, Tampere-Talo, Mikkeli’s Martti Talvela Hall, and the Turku Concert House in Finland; Pollack and Redpath Halls in Montreal, and several smaller venues in Canada, Finland, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.S.
Gordon has a particularly close relationship with Jacques Ibert’s Concertino da Camera, in which he appears as soloist. He has been engaged in research into this piece for 40 years, inspired by a program of an early performance that he found while living in Barcelona in the mid-1980s. Gordon subsequently found definitive documentation, in the form of programs and reviews, of all the performances of the Concertino in its first year of existence (1935-36). Two of those reviews were written by Ibert’s lifelong friend and colleague Darius Milhaud, whose Creation of the World also appears on this concert. Beyond those program and review materials, Gordon has corresponded with sources close to the genesis of the work: Sigurd Rascher, the dedicatee; Marcel Mule, the pre-eminent French saxophonist during Ibert’s time; Alphonse Leduc Publishers; and Ibert’s children and grandchildren. On a trip to Paris in 2018, Gordon accessed the manuscript to the Concertino at Alphonse Leduc Publishers and was allowed to make digital photographs of the entire autograph score and piano reduction. During the isolated days of covid in the early 2020s, Gordon undertook a painstaking note-by-note comparison of the manuscript materials with the various printed editions of the work. He subsequently published an article on the results of that study, which supplemented the multiple articles that he had previously published on the origins and early history of the Concertino. Collectively, Gordon has presented this research through lectures in three languages at conferences, music festivals, and universities throughout North America and Europe.