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Gordon spent a summer season on the Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston, learning Webern scores and enjoying 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 study to make my very own music.”
Gordon visited a good friend on the College of California, San Diego, and found its digital music program: “It appeared like my future.” The varsity 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 form of vernacular music,” Gordon stated. “Tonality was forbidden.”
“Peter was an early adopter — he was all the time 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 Faculty in Oakland and gave a efficiency that Gordon discovered “each vernacular and radical on the identical time,” Gordon transferred there, transferring to the Bay Space 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! That is the music I’ve been in search of,” he stated. In an e-mail, Riley known as Gordon “one of the sensible 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 variety of the hard-honking R&B sax sound of Junior Walker and King Curtis. Minimalism and funk share a standard aspect, he realized: repetition.
In 1975, he moved to New York Metropolis with Acker, who shortly turned famend for her transgressive, blood-soaked prose. She “typically behaved like a baby, and a bratty one at that,” her biographer Jason McBride wrote, and she or he was disliked by lots of Gordon’s mates. “She had very darkish spirals,” Gordon stated, “which may very well be fascinating and compelling.”
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