A Conversation with Composer Ricky Ian Gordon, Part 1
2014; Routledge; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores ResumoIN COMPOSER RICKY IAN GORDON'S LOVELY, colorful apartment in Manhattan, in which he has lived for almost 25 years, we had the following conversation . . .Leslie Holmes: What was it like growing up with three older sisters?Ricky Ian Gordon: It was so great. I adored them and, obviously, I was adored, because I came seven years later than them. They were very interesting women. They were mercurial. They were brilliant. They were all different, and they deeply influenced me. Among other things, my sister Susan would put me to bed by reading me poetry. So I was instilled, right from the beginning, with a love of poetry. My sister Lorraine lived on the lower East Side. She got pregnant when she was sixteen, and my mother would send me there to cheer her up. I stayed with her a lot, and one of the first things I remember was going to see the Japanese movie called Gates of Hell. I have an adoring obsession with foreign films. I'm sure it began around then. My sister Susan introduced me to the music of Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell became a big influence on me. And my sister Sheila is a painter. She did that portrait over the piano.LH: What a wonderful painting.RIG: Yes, she's an amazing painter. It was a fantastic growing up. I was so close to them.LH: I have had so much fun reading Home Fires by Donald Katz. It's all about your family, but it's so much more than that. It's an incredible history of a postwar American middle class family.RIG: Right.LH: I read it and I said to myself, Where was I when all this was going on? I think I was raising children. I went to see the movie Milk, last year, with my brother in San Francisco. We sat in the back of the Castro Theater. I realized that Harvey Milk was shot on my oldest son's 16th birthday, so I was probably giving a birthday party. It was the third time my brother had seen it-he's gay-and he cried through the whole movie. I think that movie should be made to be seen by everybody in the country.RIG: Yes, it's a great movie. It was probably seen by a lot of people.LH: I hope so. I think it must have been hard for your father to have Lorraine living on the lower East Side, since they had moved from there to the Bronx, and then to Long Island in 1952.RIG: Right. He was like, would you want to move back there?LH: I'm sure he felt that way, since, at that time, your family was then living on nice, suburban Long Island in a beautiful house, right on the corner, in a lovely neighborhood. Why would you want to go back to poverty on the lower East Side?RIG: But the suburbs were the antithesis of what he thought they would be for his kids. They were insular. They were narrow. We were all born different, so whatever kind of norm there was to fit into in the suburbs didn't fit any of us . . . me, least of all. We all kind of sky-rocketed out of there into some sort of self-destruction, or other.LH: Well, you seem to have survived.RIG: Yes.LH: I know you've had lots of different turns in your life, and I know that, for you, growing up in Harbor Isle [Long Island] was not easy at all.RIG: No, it wasn't. It was very violent.LH: And, I think it was intolerant.RIG: Yes. I don't know how far you got into the book but, eventually, we just moved away.LH: Down to the harbor? I read the entire book, by the way.RIG: Yes, to the Boat Yard. That was far enough away from the family who had bullied me. It's funny because, recently, I saw a video of the Island because of Hurricane Sandy, and I was so moved. The whole video was amazing. One of the people who had treated me so badly in Harbor Isle is now a fireman, and he was saving lives. I thought to myself that it was all in the past. It all seems so big to you when you're kids. I had the great good fortune of transcending my childhood and making something of it.LH: And you had a really great friend.RIG: Peter? …
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