About

Theodore (Ted) Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work connects experimental music, critical organology, and science & technology studies. His current book project, The Composer’s Black Box: Cybernetics & Instrumentality in Post-War American Music, shows how scientific concepts and technologies borrowed from cybernetics, information theory, and systems-thinking became catalysts for new musical organizations—of practices, processes, and bodies.

His writing has been published by Contemporary Music Review, Current MusicologyPortable Gray, the Library of Congress, the American Musicological Association, and Cultural Anthropology, and his research has been supported by the New York Public Library and the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York. He has written program and liner notes for Unseen Worlds, and contributed exhibition texts for the 2019 exhibition Sounding Circuits at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He is the incoming Music Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

He received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago in 2018. From 2018–2020 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, where he was also a Visiting Researcher at the Computer Music Center. Since 2020, he has served as Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, City University of New York.

He performs and improvises with the Buchla Music Easel and the viola.