Steven Schick, solo recital on Feb. 14 Illustration by Ping Zhu/The New Yorker
Steven Schick, S.F. Contemporary Music artistic director, a champion of both percussion and contemporary music, hasn't given a solo recital here in 30 years, but he is going to make up for it on Valentine's Day, at the S.F. Jewish Community Center.
As if to make up for the long absence, Schick is going all out, performing works by Stockhausen, Feldman, Lachenmann, Globokar, Tenney, and Xenakis.
Last weekend, Schick had a two-night survey of his repertory, prompting Alex Ross to herald the percussionist in The New Yorker:
The master percussionist Steven Schick ... grew up on a farm near Clear Lake, Iowa. His earliest musical memory is of his mother playing Chopin on the piano late at night while the wind howled outside. "I remember the wind as much as the Chopin," he said recently, on the phone from San Diego, where he lives. "And I remember the sound of the ice on the lake breaking up — this glass-wind-chime effect, as a huge wave of ice cubes broke on the shore. I remember wondering why that wasn’t music, too."
The art of percussion is an endless patrol on the border between music and noise. In classical music, it is among the newest of genres: Darius Milhaud, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage, among others, pioneered the field in the early twentieth century. Solo percussion music is even newer.
"We think of the repertory as always predating us," Schick said, "but, turning sixty, I’m actually older than the first major work for a single percussionist, Stockhausen’s Zyklus, from 1959. (Cage wrote a solo piece three years earlier, but it wasn’t performed until 1962.) At the same time, percussion is immeasurably ancient, going back to the origins of music and, perhaps, to the first stirrings of human intelligence. Still, when Schick began teaching percussion, at the University of California, San Diego, in 1991, many people in the classical world looked at him as an interloper.
JACK coming to Fort Mason in April Photo by Henrik Olund
The first concert at Miller, "Origins," reviews the genre’s early milestones; the second, "Responses," is a richly varied selection of the many works that Schick has commissioned from some of today’s finest composers. Anyone expecting a monotonous onslaught of sound may be surprised by the timbral variety that Schick can draw from his percussion battery, which ranges from drums, gongs, bells, and mallet instruments to brake drums, flowerpots, and other repurposed materials.
Schick was the founding percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars (1992-2002) and served as artistic director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève (2000-2005). He is founder and artistic director of the percussion group, red fish, blue fish.
Currently, besides his SFCMP position, Schick is also music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus.
With SFCMP, Schick will also lead an important four-day event at Fort Mason Center, called "Sweet Thunder." Participants include the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), whose artistic director, Claire Chase is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship; New York’s JACK Quartet; San Diego-based red fish blue fish; electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, "and heroes and heroines of the Bay Area taped music and electro-acoustic scene."
