Ted Gordon

Ted Gordon is a music scholar and musician whose work lies at the nexus of experimental music studies, critical organology, and science & technology studies. He earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Music for the University of Chicago in 2018, and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Music at Columbia University.

His current book project, The Composer’s Black Box: Cybernetics & Instrumentality in Post-War American Music critically explores new aesthetic, social, and technical imaginaries produced through the embrace of cybernetics and information theory by postwar American experimentalists—and the consequences of those imaginaries for auditory culture, technologies, and politics. Research for his book stems from his dissertation, “Bay Area Experimentalism: Music & Technology in the Long 1960s,” which was a Leonardo Abstracts Service Top-Ranked Thesis in 2018. His research has been supported by the New York Public Library, and his writing has been published by Current Musicology, Portable Gray, Cultural Anthropology, the American Musicological Society’s Musicology Now! blog, and the Library of Congress. His forthcoming chapter on the early electronic music of Pauline Oliveros will be published in the edited volume Performing Indeterminacy (Cambridge University Press). In 2019, he helped Seth Cluett prepare the exhibition “Sounding Circuits: Audible Histories” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In addition to international scholarly conferences, he has also given public talks about his research at the Indexical performance series in Santa Cruz, California, the Synthesizer Library Prague, and Ableton AG.

As an improviser, Ted performs with the viola and the Buchla Music Easel.