Interview: Christopher Gordon

Photo credit: Jonathan Zwartz

Interview: 8th November 2026

Australian composer Christopher Gordon has worked across film, television, concert music and ballet, with his latest project bringing a variety of influences together in a new album (review here) with music that was originally written for Alice Topp's ballet Macbeth. Featuring musicians including Gavin Harrison, Jonas Reingold, Randy McStine and Greg Howe, the album combines orchestral music with jazz, funk and progressive rock to create a very different take on Shakespeare's tragedy. I spoke to Christopher about the process of turning the ballet into an album, the musicians involved, his approach to composing for the stage and screen, his work on films including Daybreakers, his love of progressive rock and what might come next.

Hotel Hobbies: Having worked on other ballets in the past, how were you approached to work on Macbeth?

Christopher Gordon: While working on the music for her previous ballet, the choreographer Alice Topp asked me if I would like to work on her next ballet which was to be Macbeth. It was pleasure to be asked and it was easy to say yes.  

Hotel Hobbies: Before you started writing the score, how well did you know the play?

Christopher Gordon: Of course I knew of it and had a rough idea of the story but I had never read the play or seen it performed. It is a very tight play; much shorter than a play such as Hamlet. There are many elements in it which relate to time and its passing which I found appealing. The first word of the whole play is When… and things to do with time are weaved throughout.

Hotel Hobbies: With Macbeth, you have brought together orchestral music, progressive rock and jazz here. Did you know from the start that those were the musical worlds you wanted to combine?

Christopher Gordon: Yes. In a way, it was the kind of project I have been waiting for. I am a fan of seventies English prog especially bands like Genesis and Yes. These days, I mainly listen to classical music and this was an opportunity to combine different worlds. The different elements of the story and ballet would allow me to use different musical ideas. I think there is a lot of people who are quite disparaging about different genres of music. To me, there is good music and bad music.

Hotel Hobbies: How different is what we hear on the album to what was used for the ballet itself?

Christopher Gordon: The original ballet is about 90 minutes long, so roughly forty-five minutes for each half, and it was written as one continual, flowing piece of music because it was designed to work with the dancers and the action on stage. When I came to make the album, I initially cut it down to around sixty minutes but eventually brought it to its current length of about fifty minutes. The important thing was that it needed to work as an album in its own right rather than simply being a recording of the ballet. When you are watching the ballet, you have the dancers, the choreography and everything happening on stage to give you the context, whereas listening to the music on its own is a very different experience.

Hotel Hobbies: For the album, you brought in musicians such as Gavin Harrison, Jonas Reingold, Randy McStine and Greg Howe. Did you have particular players in mind when you were putting this recording together?

Christopher Gordon: As I mentioned, I had a good knowledge of the progressive rock bands from the seventies, but I was a bit out of touch with the more current players, so I started looking around on YouTube. I put together a list of people I thought might be right for the project and started contacting them. Some did not reply, some came back and said thanks but no, and some said yes. I was very pleased with the people who agreed to be involved because the ones who did respond were very committed to the project. It was actually quite interesting discovering all these different people and seeing the different personalities and musicians who contributed to the album. Gavin, of course, is one of the three drummers in King Crimson, another famous British prog band.

There was a variety of players needed because for example, with The Banquet, it is a big cast number. The whole cast get to dance and it is a bit of a party at first, that becomes dark because that is the part where Macbeth imagines he can see Banquo's ghost. I wanted to do something a bit funky. I have always loved the bass playing of Alan Spenner. He used to play with Joe Cocker but I basically knew him from the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar; he was the bass player on that. I have always just loved that style. So when I decided to do a sort of seventies funk sort of thing for the banquet, I approached Mohini Dey to do that, and she did that little bit. I was just bowled over that all of those people said yes to doing it, because I am very aware that they do not know who I am. That was fabulous.  

Hotel Hobbies: Thinking about some of the actual tracks on the album, The Battle Lost and Won walks the line between the physical action of battle and the emotion of those involved.

Christopher Gordon: The whole ballet is set in the modern day in the world of politics and big business. So it is a bit like Parliament, you know, jumping all over, physically jumping all over each other, which is great. I do work by emotion and psychology. Somehow or other, I just get a feel for it. It is an unfolding process. Perhaps each day as you are working, you nudge it this way or nudge it that way. The emotion is generating the physical.

Hotel Hobbies: There is great variety on the album. This Night's Great Business is much more jazz dance-like. Why did you take that approach on this particular piece?

Christopher Gordon: First of all, I will give you the practical reason, which is that I knew that in Act One, I had to have a big cast dance that was basically a party. This is the moment where Duncan arrives at Macbeth's home, so of course they throw a big dinner and party. Then in the second act, I knew that there would be the banquet when Banquo's ghost appears. So, I knew that I had two big numbers that had to be substantial pieces. I wondered, how do I approach that without being repetitive? I did not want to write one thing and then sort of do the same thing again the next time, even if it would have been a little bit darker. I do not know where the idea came from. It just seemed obvious to me. I did the Act One piece, This Night's Great Business, as sort of a forties big band piece, whereas the banquet is more seventies funk. That gave me a bit of difference there, even though many of the musical ideas that are buried within it are the same. Like Shakespeare, I have tried to weave the same ideas right through everything.

Hotel Hobbies: On If It Were Done, you strip everything back to a string octet. There is a very stately feel to part of this track. It seems like a deliberate thing to move from the big party scene and really focus in on one character on that piece.

Christopher Gordon: It was. In the stage show, the octet are mostly associated with the two Macbeths alone, and so that gives a great contrast from all the bigger things that are going on. When the two of them are alone, it just comes down to something where you have got the eight string players. Sometimes that was brought back even further to just a solo cello for Macbeth, or a solo viola for Lady Macbeth. Solo string instruments are very, very intimate. They have personalities. You have got eight personalities with an octet but you get the sense of personality, of closeness to what is going on. I thought that was a really good technique to use. I really like the way, after two big numbers, it comes down to this quite intimate piece. I have got to admit, I do not know how the prog fans and everybody else are going to react to having something like that on an album. With the jazz and funk as well, it is quite a mixture.

Hotel Hobbies: Night’s Black Agents has three sections and the first is probably the heaviest section of the album. It also has some great guitar from Marcel Coenen of Ayreon.

Christopher Gordon: That is where Macduff's family are murdered. Macbeth sends assassins to go and murder them. And consequently, you have that screaming guitar by Marcel, which is fabulous. It is just so arresting. Then it goes into the central section, which is called The Night Is Long. That is related to Malcolm, the son who has fled, and when Macduff finds out that his family has been killed. That in itself, that little threesome, is quite contrasting. It has got the huge screaming guitar and then the more military sort of sound of the brass and the timpani. Then, it kicks out to the moment where the third part is where Banquo is killed, where he is murdered by the assassins, which is basically Gavin Harrison on drums, Jonas Reingold on bass and about five Randy McStines all playing over the top at the same time.

Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned King Crimson earlier. That part of the track certainly has that feel.

Christopher Gordon: (smiling) I'll be honest, I apologised to Gavin when I sent it to him. I said somehow or other, my inner Crimson came out when I wrote it.

Hotel Hobbies: The variety on the album shows that you did not put any limit on different styles.

Christopher Gordon: Absolutely. I saw no real barriers apart from what the story needed. It always comes back to what does the story need and what Alice Topp, the choreographer, needed to be able to tell that story. Really, that is all it came down to. We had the chance to go and combine all these different styles without limitation.

Hotel Hobbies: The Banquet, both on the album and in play, is a pivotal section. It runs for eleven minutes and gave you the chance to be more expansive.

Christopher Gordon: It starts off with the seventies funk stuff but then there is a point where Macbeth goes and talks to the assassin and finds that Banquo's son has fled. Then, he comes back and he is feeling guilty and starts seeing the ghost, and so on, and everybody thinks he has gone crazy. So there is a real journey there for the music to take. It took ages to write that one. I had a model - in the lucid sense, I had a model. I do not know if you know the song by David Bowie called Sue (Or in a Season of Crime). There are two versions. There's one that he did with Maria Schneider. There is the basic song and it has Mark Guiliana's scatter drums and over the top there is a collage of instruments coming in. That was sitting in the back of my mind for the latter part of The Banque where I have a collage of sounds including the choir.

Hotel Hobbies: Thinking of the Cantillation Choir, one of my favourite parts of the album involving them is the build up during Something Wicked This Way Comes. You maintain an incredible tension before the climax.

Christopher Gordon: Yes. That is perhaps the most cinematic piece. A big symphonic score. That is the scene where Macbeth sees the witches and they give him various prophecies and then they show him that he will not be king, but the descendants of Banquo will be. You see eight kings. That is in the play. In the stage production it was done a little differently, but I did not know that at the time. I was doing it as in the play. Hence you get this grandeur of eight generations of kings coming, which is not actually what Macbeth wants because they are not his children. So, there is a darkness to it. I really enjoyed doing that.

There is a theme in that which has appeared in quite a few of the pieces that you may not even know unless you really listen to it. But I think of it as the leadership theme, the kingly theme, which comes through and it is quite in slow motion there. We hear it quite a few times in the various tracks, always in relation to someone being the king or someone wanting to be the king.

Hotel Hobbies: You previously mentioned the intimacy of strings and on Out, Damned Spot, you have particularly beautiful use of solo viola.

Christopher Gordon: Thank you. I knew I was going to do that ages before because I more or less wrote the pieces in order. The backing is just a choir and they are repeating the same little sequence over and over again with slightly different voicings. A bit louder, a bit softer but it is always the same. In fact, that sequence appears around fifty times in the second act. The viola solo is played by Richard Waters, who is the principal viola player in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and used to be in the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. He is an absolutely wonderful player. I think it is many people's favourite piece, actually.

Hotel Hobbies: The album ends with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, where you have some spoken dialogue. What was the idea behind having dialogue in that particular piece?

Christopher Gordon: That was my idea. It just seemed like a natural progression have the sound of that voice due to the unexpectedness of it. In terms of Shakespeare, it really sums up the entire play. It is about the fact that we all live our lives feeling like we are really important and in the end it is just nothing. That is the point. At least, that is how Macbeth thinks of it. Somehow, bringing the voice in underlines that. After all, this was for a ballet. If I was writing a pure album, I would have done the whole thing differently, I am sure.

Hotel Hobbies: Cutting down the ballet score to make an album, how did you decide which pieces to cut?

Christopher Gordon: I honestly thought right up until almost the end that I was going to do a double album and release the whole thing. I decided that this way would just be tighter. Choosing the bits, a lot of moments are obvious which ones you are going to put in. There are about four other tracks that I might have included. I mentioned that it could have been sixty minutes instead of fifty. I have got them sitting there and they are mastered, so who knows what the future holds regarding them. It just seemed obvious that this was the best listening experience. I also thought that apart from the people who see the ballet and may or may not hopefully like the music and might want to get it, the audience was generally closer to prog rock, at least in the broadest sense of that. There are a few things that I dropped that perhaps do not quite fit that. It was not too hard in the end. It was just a step-by-step process, going from ninety minutes to sixty minutes to fifty minutes. I did that quite quickly - in about a week, I think.

Hotel Hobbies: Macbeth itself is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays. Looking back at some of your previous work, you have written music for Daybreakers, Salem’s Lot and Out of the Shadows. Is that darkness something that appeals to you?

Christopher Gordon: Not in a unique sense no but yes in as much as I enjoy doing it. I also like doing the light stuff. And in fact, one of my favourite film scores was for a film called Ladies in Black, which I don't know if it ever made it to the UK, but I really enjoyed that. It was quite light. I've never watched horror movies, to be honest and I kept getting offered horror movies to score all the time. I did have a great time. It gives you an opportunity to go to places you wouldn't otherwise. I really enjoyed doing Daybreakers and Salem's Lot. I wouldn't say that I never sought them out. With those sorts of movies, you can be quite symphonic, quite operatic in your approach; you don't have to just sit down under the dialogue and not be noticed. There are moments where you can come out into the open and of course that's fun. That's one of the great things about that genre.

Hotel Hobbies: In terms of composition, what are the differences between composing for film and composing for ballet?

Christopher Gordon:  The first thing that comes to mind is time. In a film, you might have to write something that might be exactly two minutes, thirty-five seconds and seven frames, and that is basically what it has to be. You have got no choice. During that process, you have to hit this bit of this second and this bit of that and so on. In a ballet, it is more like, give us a piece that goes for about three minutes. I write a piece of music that goes for about three minutes, but it might be two minutes, fifty seconds, it might be three minutes, ten seconds. There is a freedom there and that means the music can bloom a lot more. The thing with film is when the film suddenly turns left, you have to turn left with it. You cannot just keep going on your merry way. That is a great joy about doing ballet.

There is a lot that is similar. You are still getting into the psychology and you are still getting into the emotion. That is how I do everything. People often ask me if I get given the dance steps beforehand, which I do not, or if I imagine the dancers, and I do not really. I just imagine the emotion and make music that works for whatever is going on. There is a similarity there perhaps with film as well, where I am always driven by the psychology. You mentioned Daybreakers, and perhaps I could have just done that straight as horror, with a little bit of a military feel to it and so on. However, I was just struck by the sadness in the film. The sadness of these people, even the vampires and their resources are running out and they cannot get any more humans to get the blood from and so on. It is quite funny when you say it out loud if you have seen the film and there is a real sadness  and melancholy about it. That is what I picked up on.

Hotel Hobbies: Obviously you have done things with ballet and you have done things with film. Have you ever thought about writing an instrumental album purely for yourself, rather than writing it for a particular project?

Christopher Gordon: Yes, indeed. As I mentioned earlier, I sort of ended up back in prog rock again because of Macbeth after many, many decades, never really intending to get into it. Because of that, I have had such a ball, and I have had the good fortune to have these wonderful players play with me. I have actually got another album almost finished, which I will not say too much more about, but it does involve a lot of old tracks and some new stuff. There is only a little bit of vocal on there. That is almost finished, so I am already thinking about the next thing. Will I go instrumental or will I do songs, and what will it be about? I do like Shakespeare, so the mind is thinking for sure. Absolutely.

Hotel Hobbies: Over all the time you have been a composer, what is the most valuable lesson you have learned?

Christopher Gordon: That is a hard one. Normally people say, what would you say to a young composer? That is an easy one to answer: you need tenacity. You just need to hang in there. I do not know what I have learned. The day-to-day life experience of being a composer is very much up and down. I think it is for pretty much everybody. There is an extraordinary richness to it, though. I just feel that being involved in music and listening to what other people do opens up the world and opens up your mind to the world so much more. It brings in other cultural thoughts, other political thoughts and a historical sense of humanity's big arc, its big journey.

Something else that comes to mind, whether it is what you are asking or not, is that when I was younger, I liked a lot of different types of music, but I would turn my nose up at this or that. As I have got older, I have appreciated more and more those things. Even if it is not my thing, even if it is not something I would listen to at home, I can see why people like it and what is good about it. That is what I am trying to say. Music opens you up. It makes you a better person, and it is a wonderful experience. I feel a bit pompous saying that (laughing).

Hotel Hobbies: Not at all. I think listening Macbeth took me down a different avenue so it was great to have it sent to me. Thank you so much for your time and good luck with whatever comes next.

Christopher Gordon: Thanks very much. I hope we get to speak again.

Macbeth is out now.

Christopher Gordon online

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