\n<\/p>\n
Gordon spent a summer at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Webern scores and playing sax in a funk band. \u201cIt became clear to me that I wasn\u2019t going to be a jazz cat,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t replicate Charlie Parker\u2019s solos, so I had to learn to make my own music.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon visited a friend at the University of California, San Diego, and discovered its electronic music program: \u201cIt seemed like my destiny.\u201d The school had a futurist mandate as well as early models of the Moog and Buchla synthesizers, which were located in Quonset huts left behind by the Marine Corps, the campus\u2019s previous occupants. \u201cThere was no respect for any kind of vernacular music,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cTonality was forbidden.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeter was an early adopter \u2014 he was always ahead of the game,\u201d said the guitarist and music scholar Ned Sublette, who met Gordon when both were grad students at U.C.S.D. After the alternative opera composer Robert Ashley came down from Mills College in Oakland and gave a performance that Gordon found \u201cboth vernacular and radical at the same time,\u201d Gordon transferred there, moving to the Bay Area with Acker, who was his girlfriend.<\/p>\n
At Mills, he studied with Ashley and Terry Riley, whose landmark piece \u201cIn C\u201d (1968) had captivated him. \u201cIt was like, Wow! This is the music I\u2019ve been looking for,\u201d he said. In an email, Riley called Gordon \u201cone of the most brilliant students I taught at Mills.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon began to imagine a fusion of his influences: Riley, some Jeff Beck, some Captain Beefheart, and a lot of the hard-honking R&B sax sound of Junior Walker and King Curtis. Minimalism and funk share a common element, he realized: repetition.<\/p>\n
In 1975, he moved to New York City with Acker, who quickly became renowned for her transgressive, blood-soaked prose. She \u201coften behaved like a child, and a bratty one at that,\u201d her biographer Jason McBride wrote, and she was disliked by many of Gordon\u2019s friends. \u201cShe had very dark spirals,\u201d Gordon said, \u201cwhich could be fascinating and compelling.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n