Seeing Through
A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The true confessions of a working opera composer: an exhilarating story of "a life that comes out of chaos."
At eight years old, Ricky Ian Gordon pulled The Victor Book of Opera off his piano teacher’s bookshelf, and his world shifted on its axis. Though scandal, sadness, and confusion would shake that world over the next few decades, its polestar remained constant. Music has been the guiding force of Gordon’s life; through it, he has been able not only to survive great sorrow but also to capture the depths of his emotion in song. It is this strength, this technical and visceral genius, that has made him one of our generation’s greatest composers.
In Seeing Through, Gordon writes with humor, insight, and incredible candor about his life and work: a tumultuous youth on Long Island, his artistic collaborations and obsessions, the creation of his compositions (including The Grapes of Wrath, 27, Orpheus and Euridice, Intimate Apparel, Ellen West, and more), his addictions and the abuses he endured, and the loss of his partner to AIDS and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Gordon writes of that period: “We were, thousands of us, Lazarus. We had to rise from the ashes. We didn’t have to rebuild our lives, we had to build new ones.”
Gordon has succeeded in building a remarkable life, as well as a body of work that bears witness to all he survived in the process—one that will endure as a pivotal chapter in America's songbook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Composer Gordon's ungainly debut autobiography teeters unsteadily between illuminating and off-putting. Beginning with his birth on Long Island in 1956 and plodding forward to 2024, Gordon provides an exhaustive and often lurid look at the art and experiences that shaped him. Early sections focus on Gordon's sexually tangled youth, during which he developed an incestuous attraction to his father (never acted upon) and, by 15, equated "older heterosexual men... having sex with me" with affection. A love of music, and opera in particular, grounded him. Admitted to Carnegie Mellon at age 16, he studied piano, composition, and acting. While discussing the intricacies of his own compositions, Gordon touches on how artists including Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim influenced him. After he graduates from Carnegie Mellon and makes a name for himself, the book dishes on these and other legendary figures, sharing uncomfortable anecdotes about "sitting with a... clearly jonesing Liza Minelli" and developing tense rivalries with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Adam Guettel. The effect is overstimulating and undernourishing, with affecting threads about addiction and AIDS-era New York crowded out before they can be fully developed. Gordon's rationale—that other artists might benefit from knowing about his "messy, disgusting, glorious, shameful" evolution—fails to justify this undisciplined ramble. It's a disappointment.
