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Gordon spent a summer season on the Berklee College of Music in Boston, learning Webern scores and taking part in sax in a funk band. “It turned clear to me that I wasn’t going to be a jazz cat,” he stated. “I couldn’t replicate Charlie Parker’s solos, so I needed to be taught to make my very own music.”
Gordon visited a pal on the University of California, San Diego, and found its digital music program: “It appeared like my future.” The faculty had a futurist mandate in addition to early fashions of the Moog and Buchla synthesizers, which have been situated in Quonset huts left behind by the Marine Corps, the campus’s earlier occupants. “There was no respect for any type of vernacular music,” Gordon stated. “Tonality was forbidden.”
“Peter was an early adopter — he was at all times forward of the sport,” stated the guitarist and music scholar Ned Sublette, who met Gordon when each have been grad college students at U.C.S.D. After the choice opera composer Robert Ashley got here down from Mills College in Oakland and gave a efficiency that Gordon discovered “each vernacular and radical on the identical time,” Gordon transferred there, transferring to the Bay Area with Acker, who was his girlfriend.
At Mills, he studied with Ashley and Terry Riley, whose landmark piece “In C” (1968) had captivated him. “It was like, Wow! This is the music I’ve been on the lookout for,” he stated. In an electronic mail, Riley known as Gordon “some of the good college students I taught at Mills.”
Gordon started to think about a fusion of his influences: Riley, some Jeff Beck, some Captain Beefheart, and a whole lot of the hard-honking R&B sax sound of Junior Walker and King Curtis. Minimalism and funk share a typical ingredient, he realized: repetition.
In 1975, he moved to New York City with Acker, who shortly turned famend for her transgressive, blood-soaked prose. She “usually behaved like a toddler, and a bratty one at that,” her biographer Jason McBride wrote, and he or she was disliked by lots of Gordon’s associates. “She had very darkish spirals,” Gordon stated, “which might be fascinating and compelling.”
