He grew up in Nicaragua on the outskirts of Managua in an Eastern European Jewish community before moving back to Miami Beach at age eight.

Gordon's music is an outgrowth of his experience with underground rock bands in New York City and his formal training in composition at Yale where he studied with Martin Bresnick.

The opera The Carbon Copy Building,[2] a collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, received the 2000 Village Voice Obie Award for Best New American Work.

Gordon, Wolfe and Lang subsequently collaborated with librettist Deborah Artman on the 'oratorio' Lost Objects, the recording of which was released in summer 2001 (Teldec New Line).

[3] A further project is Shelter,[4] a multi-media work that was commissioned by the ensemble musikFabrik and features the Scandinavian vocalists Trio Mediaeval in a staged spectacle that, in the words of librettist Deborah Artman, "evokes the power and threat of nature, the soaring frontier promise contained in the framing of a new house, the pure aesthetic beauty of blueprints, the sweet architecture of sound and the uneasy vulnerability that underlies even the safety of our sleep.

Both Shelter and Carbon Copy Building were staged by New York's Ridge Theater, in collaboration with Laurie Olinder (visual graphics), Bill Morrison (filmmaker) and Bob McGrath (director), with whom Gordon has often worked.

[6] In 2017, Chinese singer Gong Linna premiered Cloud River Mountain, written by the three Bang on a Can composers in addition to Lao Luo.

[10] Other works with Caplan include Grand Dairy, based on a diner on New York's Lower East Side, which was produced in Vienna in 1996, and Weather (German Tour 1997), in which the 16 string players of Ensemble Resonanz perform on a vertical stage surrounded by video panels.

In 1997 he worked with playwright Anna Deavere Smith on House Arrest, First Edition, which premiered at the Arena Stage Theater in Washington, DC.

In 2014–15 it was played in Walt Disney Concert Hall (performed by So Percussion and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), in Belgium (by Ictus), and in Scandinavia (by Nordic Seks).

[16] In 2008, Gordon collaborated with Ridge Theater again on the multi-performer song-cycle Lightning at our Feet, co-commissioned by Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the Next Wave Festival.

Directed by Bob McGrath, the work premiered at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in February 2004 with the American Composers Orchestra and combines Bill Morrison's archival and original footage of New York with Laurie Olinder's photographic projections of the urban landscape.