Reviews

May 30 2017

Percussionist Steven Schick is wizard of noises

By Joshua Kosman, SFGate
Originally published February 18, 2014; full text and original article visible here.

“To call Steven Schick one of the great percussion virtuosos of our time is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. As Friday’s exhilarating solo recital at the JCC of San Francisco made clear, Schick is also an actor, mime, storyteller and all-around spellbinder – albeit a low-key one – on stage.

Perhaps none of that should be too surprising for an artist who casts such a deliberately wide net. A percussionist, as Schick told the audience, is “a linguist in the language of noises.”

Certainly Friday’s program – presented by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, of which Schick is the artistic director – seemed designed to showcase not only his own gifts, but the polyglot range of sounds that can fall under the heading of “percussion music.” A diverse smorgasbord of 10 pieces drawn from the past half-century, it included everything from straightforward rhythmic etudes to exercises in sheer theatrical whimsy.

Schick established a ground plan almost from the start, with two contrasting early landmarks of the solo percussion repertoire. On one side was Stockhausen’s “Zyklus” from 1959 (sometimes billed as the first piece for solo percussion), with all its restless energy and kitchen-sink unpredictability coming through in a taut performance.

On the other was “The King of Denmark,” Morton Feldman‘s 1964 collection of characteristically whisper-faint sonorities. The palette of sounds here – vague insinuations from a cymbal, faint skitterings from a drum head – is all delivered with the bare hands, and sometimes teeters so close to inaudibility as to be more an implication of music than music itself.

Alongside those explorations of the coloristic possibilities of the instruments were other pieces that dove deep into a world of rhythmic complexity. Two works by Iannis Xenakis, “Rebonds” and “Psappha” – simply scored but full of expressive power – stood as testaments to the ability of pure rhythm to exert a pull. And the even greater rhythmic challenges of Brian Ferneyhough‘s “Bone Alphabet” sounded almost lyrical in Schick’s hands.

Then there was repertoire that called for an even greater range of performance skills than are taught in most conservatories. In Vinko Globokar’s inventive and poignant “Toucher,” Schick was called on to recite swatches of Bertolt Brecht’s play “Galileo” in French translation, while using various percussion instruments – a tambourine, a cowbell – to simultaneously mimic the vowel sounds of the text.

“Wendell’s History,” a diptych by Gustavo Aguilar whose two parts framed the concert, had him reciting the words of the American poet Wendell Berry while chiming background sounds emerged from a hand-held tape recorder. And in perhaps the most dazzling piece of theatrical legerdemain, Mark Applebaum‘s “Aphasia” required Schick to go through a tightly choreographed repertoire of physical gestures in time to a prerecorded sound track – the mastery of rhythmic patterns in an alternate form.

Schick dispatched all of it from memory, with an easy grace that gave no hint of the technical difficulties involved. He’s some kind of wizard.”

May 30 2017

OUTSIDERS: The Ojai Music Festival

By Alex Ross, The New Yorker
Originally published July 6, 2015; full text and original article visible here.

“At first glance, it is a mystery how the prosperously rustic town of Ojai, California, came to host one of the world’s great festivals of modern music. Tucked away in a lush valley at the edge of Los Padres National Forest, sixty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, Ojai is not the sort of place where one would expect to find an aesthetic of musical experiment. Its crisp air, sycamore groves, and mountain views have long attracted millionaires, spiritual seekers, and bohemians. In the nineteen-twenties, the Indian guru Jiddu Krishnamurti and various personalities connected with the Theosophical movement took up residence in Ojai. More recently, the town has attracted a smattering of Hollywood celebrities, who seem to pass through its streets unmolested.

Amid the self-discovery talks, spa treatments, and rounds of golf, the Ojai Music Festival has been raising a finely calibrated ruckus each spring since 1947. Stravinsky and Copland have presided over performances of their own works, and Pierre Boulez has served as music director on seven occasions. The jazz great Eric Dolphy once played Varèse’s “Density 21.5”; Mauricio Kagel led his “Anagrama,” for speaking, spluttering chorus. In 1999, when I first visited, a gang of Finns banged on discarded auto parts that were dangling from Ojai’s ancient trees. (Most events in the festival take place at the Libbey Bowl, in the town park.) At the most recent edition, under the aegis of the percussionist and conductor Steven Schick, there were shrieks of flute and clatterings of gong; two works involving stones that were knocked together; austere chamber programs of Bartók and Boulez; a concussive hour of Varèse; a recitation of Kurt Schwitters’s Dada poem “Ursonate”; and a rendition of Morton Feldman’s five-hour trio, “For Philip Guston,” which began at 5 a.m. on a Sunday.

On second thought, no one should be surprised that such an institution took root in Southern California. The esoteric sects that proliferated in the state at the turn of the last century had myriad connections to modernism in the arts. The lineage of experimental composers who grew up on the West Coast or were based there for part of their careers—Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, James Tenney, and Pauline Oliveros, among others—is central to contemporary music history. And the mighty exodus of composers from Nazi-occupied Europe to Los Angeles, led by Schoenberg and Stravinsky, prepared the conditions in which the festival flowered.

To attend Ojai is to enter a happily topsy-turvy world where longtime patrons are as avid for new music as they are for classic repertory. Works are sometimes criticized for being too accessible; such was a not uncommon reaction to a piece performed at this year’s festival, Michael Harrison’s “Just Ancient Loops,” in which the cellist Maya Beiser spun out soothingly euphonious lines. Conversely, after the clarinettist Joshua Rubin sailed through Boulez’s coolly spastic “Dialogue de l’Ombre Double,” a woman behind me exclaimed, “Now, that’s real music!” She employed the tone of relief that one hears at Lincoln Center when Boulez gives way to Brahms. What is different about Ojai? It has to do, I think, simply with the power of consistency: the festival stuck to its mission, year after year, decade after decade, until, at some point, its ideal audience became the real one.

Ojai appoints a different music director each year. Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, and Jeremy Denk have participated in recent seasons, and Peter Sellars will unleash his enthusiasms in 2016. Schick, who teaches at the University of California, San Diego, and also leads the La Jolla Symphony and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, is not as well known as the others, but in the contiguous worlds of percussion and new music he possesses quasi-legendary status. That he is committed to modern fare is a given; as he likes to say, he is older than his repertory, having been born in 1954, five years before Stockhausen wrote “Zyklus,” which is considered the first major work for solo percussion. Schick finds force and feeling in the allegedly cerebral world of the European avant-garde; at the same time, he brings rigor and focus to the American experimental and minimalist traditions. He is one of the supreme living virtuosos, not only of percussion but of any instrument.

At the heart of the 2015 festival, which unfolded from June 10th to June 14th, was a solo program by Schick, and its centerpiece was “Zyklus”—a magisterially ambiguous creation that combines precisely notated sections with more open-ended passages that leave considerable choice to the performer. Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd. Although Schick meticulously plans each performance, he gives the impression of engaging in intuitive action, as if no score existed and the music were all muscle memory. The distinction between idea and gesture was similarly blurry in his accounts of Xenakis’s percussion pieces “Rebonds” and “Psappha,” and it disappeared altogether in Vinko Globokar’s “?Corporel,” which calls for a semi-naked percussionist to make sounds with his or her amplified body, slapping hands against skin.

Members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, which has lately emerged as America’s foremost new-music group, joined Schick for the majority of the concerts, and they were willing collaborators in his quest for uninhibited instrumental theatre. The flutist Claire Chase, the co-founder of I.C.E., gave a free, impassioned rendition of “Density 21.5”—one that might have compared favorably with Dolphy’s, had it been recorded. She also tore into Mario Diaz de León’s “Luciform,” which has a trace of heavy metal in its helter-skelter, electronically enhanced cadenzas. The cellist Katinka Kleijn donned a mask to perform Du Yun’s “San,” an opulent fantasy on the ancient Chinese piece “Guangling San.” In Rand Steiger’s “Template for Improvising Trumpeter and Ensemble,” Peter Evans, in jagged lightning streaks of notes, seemed to revive the fusion of modern jazz and composition prophesied by the great Gunther Schuller, who died on June 21st.

In all, there were eighteen concerts (I saw thirteen), featuring forty-seven composers, most of them living. “Sonic gluttony,” Chase called it, and some Ojai veterans came away feeling overstuffed. As Saturday gave way to Sunday, the schedule became a bit mad: at midnight, at the Libbey Bowl, Schick finished conducting Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” and just five hours later, in the Ojai Art Center, he stood before a vibraphone and played, alongside Chase and the pianist Sarah Rothenberg, the opening notes of “For Philip Guston.” A groggy group of sixty people were there at the beginning, and more than a hundred were present at the end. To listen to Feldman’s vast, hushed creation as the world outside moved from night to day was a singular experience, yet I felt a little bedraggled by the end of it: such music requires more mental space for contemplation. The superhuman Schick went on performing for the remainder of the day.

By conventional standards, Ojai is hardly an ideal concert environment. The amplification system at the Libbey Bowl is less than state-of-the-art; I had the impression, as the Calder Quartet played Bartók, that the group was delivering tonally refined and rhythmically vigorous accounts, yet the music kept wafting past my ears. Furthermore, distractions are constant, as airplanes, cars, birds, dogs, and children make themselves heard. Often, though, the ambient noise adds accidental beauties. Cawing crows provided an apt prelude to Bartók’s savage Third Quartet. The snoring sounds that Globokar notated in his “?Corporel” score were echoed by slumbering patrons at “Guston.” Songbirds softened the severities of Boulez’s “Improvisations sur Mallarmé,” as if Messiaen, Boulez’s bird-loving teacher, were providing commentary. (Schick placed Boulez’s two Mallarmé settings amid Ravel’s “Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,” making the two composers seem like avatars of a single secretive spirit. Mellissa Hughes proved a staggeringly flexible vocal soloist.)

In several of the festival’s most memorable moments, intrusions from the outside were deliberately staged. At a morning concert at the Besant Hill School—an institution whose founders include Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley—I.C.E. presented Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “In the Light of Air,” for viola, cello, piano, harp, percussion, and electronics. The piece began in low light, with filament bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The instruments offered up a subdued, eerie fabric of timbres: ghostly glissandos on the viola and cello, fingertips and Super Balls brushing the strings of the harp and piano. In the course of four movements, this evanescent material acquired mass: droplets of melody and harmony precipitated from the air. Just before the end, darksome bitonal chords began crashing on the harp and piano, like the bell of a phantom cathedral. Suddenly, the wall at the back of the auditorium was rolled aside, ushering in the bright-gray light and chilly breeze of a cloudy Ojai morning. Nothing I witnessed in opera houses this past season was as dramatic.

Just as transcendent was the ending of John Luther Adams’s “Sila: The Breath of the World,” an hour-long work designed for the outdoors, in which strings, wind, brass, voices, and percussion generate incrementally shifting clouds of tones based on the natural harmonic series emanating from a low B-flat. The event took place in the park outside the Libbey Bowl. Listeners walked among the ensemble, their sonic perspective constantly changing. Amid the brass, the blendings of harmonics were grand and dire; amid the strings, they were ethereal, insubstantial. In the score’s final minutes, the musicians are asked to breathe aloud, and then to listen to sounds emanating from the space. From somewhere, I heard an intermittent high-pitched squeak and looked around for its source. In the distance, a child was swaying on a rusty swing.”

May 30 2017

Steven Schick dazzles in Boulez’s ‘Répons’

By Christian Hertzog, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Originally published February 2, 2017; full text and original article visible here.

“‘Schick Happens.’

It’s a slogan known well in contemporary music circles. Wednesday evening at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, Steven Schick presided over an unusual American performance of Pierre Boulez’s “Répons,” demonstrating how he earned that accolade.

“Répons” (“Response”) is a musical triumph but a financial challenge. Requiring a chamber orchestra of 24 musicians, six soloists (including that rarity, a cimbalom virtuoso), and a team of sound technicians and computer processors, it also needs a venue where the orchestra can be encircled by the audience, who in turn are surrounded by soloists and loudspeakers.

The logistics of funding and mounting a performance of “Répons” are so overwhelming that any opportunity to see it live without buying a plane ticket to Europe should be seized.

Enter the UCSD Department of Music and conductor Schick. His professorship there is endowed by the Reed Family, and for the second consecutive year, he has used his endowment funds to present an impractical composition which otherwise would not be heard locally.

“Répons” is an extravagant 20th-century computerized concerto grosso, 45 minutes of arpeggios, trills and machine-like pulses, surprisingly revealed, explored and held together by Boulez’s compositional mastery. The six confident soloists were Aleck Karis on piano and organ, Kyle Adam Blair on piano, Fiona Digney and James Beauton on mallet percussion, Julie Smith Phillips on harp, and Nicholas Tolle on cimbalom (a Hungarian dulcimer), all of them brilliantly sparkling on their exuberant flourishes and cadenzas.

The soloists were not only heard acoustically and distributed around the hall via loudspeakers, but also processed by a complicated program running on one petite laptop, a startling improvement over Boulez’s original team of technicians fussing over huge racks of proprietary computer gear like scientists in a 1930s science fiction film.

The orchestra consisted of UCSD faculty, students, and some of our finest local musicians, many from the San Diego Symphony. In “Répons”, the conductor exerts enormous influence over the music, choosing entrances and lengths of held notes. Schick was ideally sympathetic to Boulez’s fluid sense of time and the large-scale drama of the work. He cued musicians in front, to the sides, and behind him, overseeing precise musicianship, injecting excitement and mystery into the score. It was a stunning performance that should be fondly remembered by all present.

Unlike “Répons,” Varèse’s “Octandre” is frequently programmed. I’ve seldom heard, though, so incisive, biting and bold a performance as the eight musicians and Schick gave. Oboist Sarah Skuster gave the disjunct opening solo a haunting lyricism, and trombonist Eric Starr tightly barked out his forceful lines.

Schick commissioned Anahita Abbasi for a work to act as commentary on “Octandre” using the same instruments. The result, “Cordatum,” was a quiet meditation, punctuated by silence, on melodic figures from “Octandre.” Schick programmed it between two performances of “Octandre” with no break between, a lovely leaf of heirloom lettuce sandwiched between two dense hunks of Varése bread.

If “Octandre” is a loudly pontificating New Yorker manspreading on the subway, Abbasi’s “Cordatum” is a demure passenger scooched next to him, softly but firmly making points about similar issues. It was a programing risk that didn’t quite pay off; “Cordatum” might function better as a distant memory of “Octandre” separated by an intermission, or perhaps an entire concert.”

May 30 2017

Steven Schick Builds a Theater of Sound with his Fabulous Machine

By Rebecca Wishnia, The San Francisco Classical Voice
Originally published September 26, 2016; full text and original article visible here.

“What’s inside a Schick Machine? There are diagrams and equations, drawn on butcher paper; huge metal sculptures, balls, and hoops, and bells. A deconstructed pipe organ in the shape of a sunburst — called the Peacock — dominates the space. Somehow, Laszlo Klangfarben dreams, these mechanisms will work together in harmony, reconciling past and future, large and small.

It’s a bizarre premise — but one that forms the heart of an unclassifiable and unforgettable show: Schick Machine, starring percussionist Steven Schick and a menagerie of invented instruments and sound sculptures. Schick plays the obsessive inventor Klangfarben in this production by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, performed, on September 23, at Z Space.

With the house lights up, it takes the audience a few minutes to realize that the show has begun. Already in character, Schick ambles onstage wearing an apron over a crisp white shirt, and consults the blueprints he’s left draped over a large metal contraption. Over the next hour, he wanders around his studio, testing various noisemakers with curiosity, and often, unbridled joy.

Some of these invented instruments (Paul Dresher, Daniel Schmidt and Matt Heckert) fill conventional percussive roles — a metal mobile sounds like chimes, a large disc like a tam-tam. Some slyly nod to convention: Schick bows a snaky piece of metal, imitating a violinist’s stance. Other instruments are more peculiar. In one episode, Schick rubs mallets on a sheet of metal, producing low, oscillating drones. He accompanies these pitches with high whistling, when another whistling sound joins in — it’s the kettle, on the nearby kitchen island. He makes tea.

Only later, at the post-show instrument petting zoo — which the majority of Friday’s audience stayed to attend — can the spectators see the inner workings of these unfamiliar noisemakers. Until then, it’s like magic. Across the stage from Schick, mechanical instruments begin to bob and thrash, seemingly of their own accord.

In several episodes, composer Dresher sequentially layers these individual sounds into hugely complex textures. Looping over a driving 2+2+3 rhythm, a pentatonic sequence — played on a motorized 7-string hurdy-gurdy (called the Hurdy Grande) — joins with industrial power chords and table drumming to create a minimalist, trance-like groove. This music wouldn’t be out of place at a club, and Tom Ontiveros’s projections — flashing animations of notes from Klangfarben’s plans — finally feel necessary in this context.

As these climaxes recede, the audience is privy to musings — spoken by both Schick and a disembodied narrator — of Klangfarben, whose biographical details are sparingly but evocatively filled out. Klangfarben (German for timbres), it turns out, is an assumed last name: he worked so hard that he forgot his real one. As for Laszlo? “It just sounded good,” he quips. He’s always been enamored of machines, and his obsession with his work cost him his marriage.

That Klangfarben’s character is so completely formed out of such a slim script has much to do with the work of writer/director Rinde Eckert, whose performance in Jonathan Berger’s My Lai monodrama was a highlight of 2015.

It’s also a testament to Schick’s theatrical prowess. Bay Area audiences know to expect masterful musical performances from him — and indeed, his scat-beatboxing and hand-drumming, alone, make Schick Machine worth seeing. But they may be pleasantly surprised to learn that he is also a skilled actor. As Klangfarben, Schick moves his body as expressively as a silent film star — from his angular holding of his legs, to the tension he directs toward his shoulders, to the way he compacts his body when making a diminuendo.

It’s impossible for the audience not to root for this earnest, self-conscious hero of Schick’s creation. Toward the end of the show, Klangfarben reasons that even though the Schick Machine isn’t yet complete, “it’s theoretically sound — theoretically, it’s sound.” In this play on words, both statements are true: the audience may not understand how, exactly, the Schick Machine will reconcile the past and future, the large and small, but Klangfarben, with his enticing palette of sounds, has us utterly convinced.”

May 30 2017

A Symphony of Varying Touches

By Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
Originally published August 22, 2014; full text and original article visible here.

“During the aptly named “Shimmer,” the entrancing third movement of John Luther Adams’s “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” (2002), Steven Schick created a celestial, kaleidoscopic palette of sounds by playing on several triangles. Another alluring section unfolded with intriguing rhythmic patterns on the cymbals. In “Roar,” a halo of sounds emerged in a vigorous crescendo from the tam-tam (a type of gong).

Other of the eight movements of the approximately 75-minute piece, which Mr. Schick, a brilliant percussionist, performed on Wednesday in the Clark Studio Theater as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, were less ethereal. But even the more earthbound sections proved interesting for their textural range.

In the program notes, Mr. Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music this year, writes that “more than any other family of instruments, percussion embodies touch.”

Touch is an elusive element of music making: With imperceptibly small gradations of touch, one musician might coax beautiful tones from a piano that sounds harsh under other fingers. Regarding percussion, Mr. Adams quotes Mr. Schick as describing its essence as: “No instruments, only sticks.”

Few composers have devoted as much time to percussion as Mr. Adams, whose “Inuksuit” is scored for a battery of percussion, and varies according to location and number of performers. His catalog also includes works for percussion trio and quartet.

The ideas for “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” began to germinate when Mr. Schick visited Mr. Adams at his home in Alaska in 2001. Prerecorded materials are an integral part of any live performance of the piece, resulting in ambient waves of acoustic and electronic sounds. Some sections were played in pitch blackness; in others, silhouettes of Mr. Schick and the instruments flickered gently against the walls of the intimate black-box space.

The haunting noises of a machine, combined with an eerie electronic aura, surged to almost uncomfortably intense climaxes in “Wail.” “Burst,” the first movement, opened with an aggressive rumble on snare drums; “Stutter,” which concluded the piece, also explored the timbral range of the snare drums.

“I was exhausted just listening to it,” I overheard an audience member remark about the piece after the concert. “Imagine how he felt playing it.” Seventy-five minutes with no intermission is certainly a long time for any soloist to hold an audience’s attention and to perform without a break.

I found some of the sections, like “Shimmer,” riveting; others, like those with the snare drums, less so. But composer and performer certainly succeeded in exploring a broad range of sonic possibilities for standard percussion instruments, illuminated by Mr. Schick’s deft, nuanced touch.”

May 29 2017

Messiaen’s ‘Canyons’ packs a house

By Marcus Overton, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Originally published January 26. 2016; full text and original article visible here.

“Something wonderful happened at the junction of art and philanthropy on Sunday afternoon: a performance (to a packed Conrad Prebys Concert Hall buzzing with anticipation before and astonished satisfaction afterward) of a rarely-heard masterwork: French composer Olivier Messiaen’s “Des Canyons aux Étoiles.”

Let’s English that title — “From the Canyons to the Stars” — since its music came to Messiaen literally out of the canyons beneath and the stars above our own country, as a result of an early-’70s commission by American philanthropist Alice Tully to compose a piece for the United States Bicentennial.

In the outdoor cathedrals of Utah’s Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, the devoutly religious Messiaen and his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, looked into distance, gazed into depths and listened to the earth, the air and Messiaen’s beloved birds. Premiered in New York’s Alice Tully Hall in 1974, “Canyons” is not so much music about feelings but the feelings themselves, conveyed directly into the listener in gleaming, ringing sound that acts on the whole body viscerally, raising pulses, stopping breaths, shivering spines and goose-bumping skin.

This concert was itself also the result of a philanthropic gesture. In 2015, Joel and Ann Reed chose the UC San Diego music department as the recipient of funds to provide for performances that might otherwise be too costly to mount alone. UCSD professor Steven Schick is the inaugural occupant of the Reed Family Presidential Chair.

Currently an iconic figure in the landscape of American music, Schick collaborated with Art of Élan co-artistic director Kate Hatmaker to present “Canyons” as the first Reed Family Concert. Together they assembled an extraordinary ensemble of San Diego-based players they call RENGA (a Japanese word meaning “shared writing”).

Schick’s conducting was precise without being rigid; it was also, contradictorily, liberating. It is hard to imagine how this piece can be assembled without dominating players’ lives for months, but it was immediately clear that every player had been “wood-shedding” for a long time: The one thing Schick did not have to worry about in a work that contains every possible rhythmic, harmonic and coordination challenge was whether or not his players were technically prepared.

To compass the achievement of the soloists arrayed across the front of the platform in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, words are not quite adequate. Nicolee Kuester raised her French horn to sound the “Interstellar Call” that begins the fourth of the music’s 12 parts, and placed all of us, for a few minutes, in vast space. Pianist Aleck Karis released flights of birds — mockingbirds, orioles, wood thrushes, robins — with laser-like concentration and limpid clarity. Percussionists Sean Dowgray (glockenspiel) and Ryan Nestor (xylomarimba), at the conductor’s left on the edge of the stage, coordinated with their colleagues, UC San Diego’s renowned percussion ensemble, red fish blue fish — arrayed across the back of the orchestra — to raise a shimmering curtain of bells, gongs, rain forest murmurs and desert wind .

Enough of words, which are almost useless because Messiaen’s very aim is to make them meaningless in the face of nature.

The concert was dedicated to the memory of Pierre Boulez, and — by the musicians — in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the National Parks System.

For this listener and, I’ll wager, for everyone who was there, it was and will be unforgettable.”

May 29 2017

Body and soul, Steven Schick displays his percussion mastery

By George Grella, The New York Classical Review
Originally published January 31, 2014; full text and original article visible here.

“In an interview on radio station WKCR the day before his dazzling solo concert Thursday night at Miller Theatre, percussionist Steven Schick described his himself as “a linguist working in the land of noises.” Those words reveal both the nature of Schick’s playing and the new world that is post-WWII percussion music with typical depth, clarity and simplicity.

Schick, as musician and conductor, is a frequent visitor to New York, especially at Miller, the leading venue for new music for the last sixty years. Thursday’s concert was the first of two in the series “Steven Schick: Solo” that showcase the man and survey the music in which he is an unparalleled interpreter. Opening night was called “Origins,” with what can be called standard works, while Saturday night’s “Responses” concert is made up of music that Schick comissioned and/or premiered.

The composers on the “Origins” program included giants of twentieth century music (Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Xenakis); the contemporary master of eloquent complexity, Helmut Lachenmann with his wonderful Intérieur I; and conceptual and theatrical pieces by Vinko Globukar (Toucher and ?Corporeal) and Alvin Lucier (Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra).

Stockhausen and Xenakis are at the core of Schick’s body of work. He explained from the stage that he has been performing the former’s Zyklus for forty years and played it to begin the concert; he has also made the definitive recordings of the latter’s Psappha and Rebonds, the pieces that bookended the second half.

These three works, together, hint at the importance and scope of contemporary percussion music. After five hundred years of gradually accreting knowledge about how music could be made, the emancipation of the percussion section from the orchestra (inaugurated by Edgard Varése), along with the development of electronic music, unfolded a dimension of new instruments and entirely new compositional and notational language. Toucher, a flowing and expressive work, was the only composition written in standard notation.

The explosive and dizzying possibilities still sound fresh in Zyklus, where Stockhausen’s personality bursts through in his need to find his own means outside the calcifying ideology of serialism. The music can be played from any point, in circular fashion, until the musician has run through the score. Schick began with Stockhausen’s tight, serial-based structures and then moved quickly into dynamic, intuitive music that refused to be controlled by process. Schick’s judgement meant the piece spun back to a repeated phrase before finishing, a gesture of personal freedom that resonated with the musician and audience.

Xenakis’ own unique structural and compositional thinking connected mathematical processes to expressive ideas rooted in the dawn of Western civilization. Psappha and Rebonds are modern rituals, abstract in style but fundamentally narrative and dramatic. There is ancient poetry in each, Sappho in the former and ceremonial chanting in the latter.

Schick has absolute command of this music. His counting in Psappha is especially impressive. He is a lyrical percussionist, whether kicking the bass drum pedal or flicking his fingertip off a tubular bell, as he did with exquisite care and beauty in the hushed interior of Feldman’s The King Of Denmark (the musician plays that piece with bare hands). Striking his instruments in time with sticks and his hands, he connects events together in phrases that would sound like Mozart on the piano. He has a graceful, elegant physical style, twisting and turning his body into the shape of clefs as he plays. Every motion has a musical and expressive purpose.

He was almost hyperactive in the Feldman piece, but never busy or rushed. He was focused and succinct in Lucier’s study for triangle. This is a trademark work for the composer, an exploration of the fundamental features of pitched sound that also elevates the simplest instrument. Schick beat the miked triangle regularly and rapidly, muting it slightly with his left hand before letting the sound ring. In Miller Theatre’s space, the repeating, complex waves created a steady, singing sympathetic pitch that hummed along with his playing, both a physics lesson and a magic trick.

Schick is also an expert theatrical musician. Globukar’s pieces are theatrical, requiring musicians who can handle the technical challenges are confident and perform in an unselfconscious manner. The first of his two works, Toucher, has the percussionist reciting a French translation of Berthold Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo while shaping the vocal lines with objects chosen for their emulation of French vowel sounds. As the speaking voice drops, the instruments convey form and meaning. As fussy this seems, the music is direct and natural, and Schick delivered it with ease and charm.

More dramatic, and difficult to play, is ?Corporeal, a stunning, deeply avant-garde piece of percussion theater, both atavistically primitive and conceptually advanced. Schick sat at the front of the stage, bare-chested and barefoot, as the score instructs, bathed in red light. The body is the instrument: there are expected sounds like toungue clicks and hands slapping the chest, and surprising ones like breathing. Schick lay on the floor and snored, he sat in a lotus position and then lifted and balanced his body on his hands while reciting text. He matched the mesmerizing physicality of the piece with a natural sense of comfort in, literally, his own skin.

Schick’s encore was as unusual and direct as the music he played. He recited, from memory, Wendell Berry’s beautiful, earthy poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, a credo of a piece with his art.”

May 29 2017

The (More Than) Full Varèse: Completed Works and Others

By Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
Originally published July 21, 2010; full text and original article visible here.

“Lincoln Center has taken the idiosyncratic view in recent years that because classical music is the center’s main business, the Lincoln Center Festival should mostly steer clear of it. Last summer the festival’s classical programming was a single duo-piano recital. So it was heartening to see the music of Edgard Varèse given a prominent berth this year.

Pulling together a handful of groups — the International Contemporary Ensemble, So Percussion and Musica Sacra, conducted by Steven Schick at Alice Tully Hall on Monday, and the New York Philharmonic and the Oratorio Society of New York, led by Alan Gilbert at Avery Fisher Hall on Tuesday — the festival did this iconoclastic French-born American composer proud.

All of Varèse’s works were presented in appropriately rambunctious performances. The survey was actually more than complete: included, along with classics like “Déserts” (1954), “Ionisation” (1929-31) and “Amériques” (1918-21, revised 1929) were four scores that Varèse left unfinished or in various states of disrepair, performed in the completions written by the composer (and Varèse student) Chou Wen-chung. Two were slight (the circusy “Dance for Burgess,” composed for a failed musical starring Burgess Meredith in 1949, and “Tuning Up,” a fantasy on an orchestra’s tuning ritual (written for the film “Carnegie Hall” in 1947, but not used), and two were substantial (the vocal works, “Étude pour Espace,” from 1947, and “Nocturnal,” from 1961). But any would make a welcome addition to the canon.

Varèse has long been a name to conjure with in new-music circles, and elsewhere too: the rock musician and composer Frank Zappa consistently cited him among his influences and published a touchingly naïve but enthusiastic essay, “Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth,” about his early encounters with his music, and an attempt to meet Varèse himself. The brassy pop band Chicago admired him too, saying that Varèse expanded the group’s ideas about what was possible, and opening its fifth album with a song called “A Hit by Varèse.”

Classical players see Varèse as a fountainhead of experimental modernism — an early advocate for the notion that percussion can be a central, motivating force in music, and an early dabbler in electronic sound, sometimes (as in “Déserts”) combined with acoustic instruments. That said, Varèse’s involvement with electronic music can be overstated. He produced only one purely electronic work, the “Poème Électronique” (1958), though it is so beautifully constructed you can only wish he had continued. (That work opened the Monday evening program.)

Varèse’s music turns up on a handful of programs every season and occasionally in an ambitious retrospective. (Speculum Musicae offered a superb overview at the Miller Theater, in 2000.) But until this week’s celebration the full scope of his achievement has been most easily examined on recordings, not least those made by Pierre Boulez with several ensembles over the years.

Both of Lincoln Center’s programs were packed, and perhaps the title of its series — “Varèse: (R)evolution” — offered a reason. As gimmicky as that parenthetical R may seem, the crucial point it (and the performances) made was that as explosive and timbrally exotic as Varèse’s music can be, its structures are actually comfortingly traditional.

But one difference between Varèse and other modernists (and particularly Serialists) is that when Varèse’s music is not being assertively noisy it is built of shapely, smoothly flowing melodies rather than the angularity that characterizes so much contemporary music. Yes, these are wildly dissonant works. The Philharmonic’s energetic but surprisingly supple performances of “Amériques” and “Arcana” (1925-7, revised 1960) and the International Contemporary Ensemble’s vigorous account of the pounding, brass-heavy “Hyperprism” (1923) reveled in Varèse’s thick clouds of sound. But perhaps audiences tolerate dissonance so long as a work offers melody and structure, and those were elements Varèse never abandoned.

The performances were consistently polished and solid, but several stood out. Anu Komsi, a Finnish soprano, brought an expressive warmth to the early “Grand Sommeil Noir” (1906) and two of Mr. Chou’s completions, the intricate “Étude pour Espace” and “Nocturnal,” with its velvety vocal line offset by almost whispered Sprechstimme. Alan Held, a bass-baritone, produced exactly the right sepulchral tone for “Ecuatorial” (1934), an imaginative, quasiritualistic work based on Mayan writings, and using a pair of Theremins.

Mr. Schick, who more typically wields percussion mallets than a baton, but who is part of the growing list of percussionists-turned-conductors, oversaw skillfully balanced performances of those works and the pointillistic, partly electronic “Déserts.” And Claire Chase, the International Contemporary Ensemble flutist (and founder) gave an animated, sharply articulated account of the solo flute work, “Density 21.5” (1936).

You might have thought Mr. Schick and company could not be topped, but then Mr. Gilbert and the Philharmonic turned up to show — as it did in Ligeti’s “Grande Macabre” a few weeks ago — what this orchestra can do when it steps away from the 19th-century canon. The rumble, roar and magnificent intricacy of “Ionisation” and “Octandre” (1923) were thrilling for their drive and textural changeability. But the real highlight was “Amériques,” usually a barnstormer — or, really, a tornado that hurls a barn across a field — but here offered as a subtle essay in the distance between brutal volume and gentle delicacy.”

May 29 2017

Letters Inspire an Intertwining of Boulez and Cage

By Steve Smith, The New York Times
Originally published September 21, 2012; full text and original article visible here.

“The centenary of the great American avant-garde composer John Cage this year has brought a torrential outpouring of tribute concerts: a timely reaction that has been as welcome as it has been slightly bewildering, given Cage’s still-contentious status among a broad general audience. For new-music partisans, at least, the development has been an unbounded cornucopia. (Who would ever have imagined a year in which Cage oversaturation might threaten to set in?)

Presumably, an audience attracted to a concert in the Miller Theater’s always edifying Composer Portraits series, which focuses entirely on contemporary music, is one that would find most any Cage-related event appealing. Credit goes to the International Contemporary Ensemble (also known as ICE) for finding a new and illuminating context in which to position Cage, by juxtaposing his music with a benchmark serialist composition by Pierre Boulez, “Le Marteau Sans Maître” (“The Hammer Without a Master”), for its concert at Miller on Thursday evening.

Cage is remembered most widely for some of his dogma-flouting notions about what constitutes music, how it should be produced and whose volition — if anyone’s — should take precedence in the contract among a composer, a performer and a listener. Mr. Boulez could be viewed in some ways as Cage’s polar opposite: a composer for whom precision, exactitude and control are principal virtues.

The fascinating program was inspired by correspondence between Cage and Mr. Boulez from 1949 to 1954, when the two, newly met, were intrigued by each other’s compositional breakthroughs. As Cage moved away from rigor toward strategies of chance, the friendship cooled, ending while Mr. Boulez was writing “Le Marteau.”

Had ICE simply performed “Le Marteau” alongside the career-spanning selection of Cage compositions it presented on Thursday, the result would probably have been one of appreciating separate yet ostensibly equal approaches to making modern music. Instead, the works were fused in an almost seamless 80-minute sequence, with movements from “Le Marteau,” presented in their final order, alternating with pieces by Cage.

Now and then you still sensed connections between the two composers: chiefly, an interest in the potential of extreme instrumental techniques and a curiosity about non-Western modes of music-making, reflected in Mr. Boulez’s beguiling instrumentation and the propulsive rhythms of Cage’s percussion trio “Amores.”

But what was extraordinary about the unorthodox presentation was the complex, shifting range of responses it provoked. At the start of the program, after the herky-jerky contortions and steely reserve of Mr. Boulez’s “Avant ‘L’Artisanat Furieux,’ ” Cage’s “Music for Three” sounded like a necessary corrective: its lambent flute and pensive viola rich with implications of breath, emotion and stillness.

As the concert wore on, my responses veered sharply. After the anything-goes sensation of Cage’s “Radio Music” — admittedly in an account made dull through a lack of anything engaging being broadcast at the time — the sure hand of volition evident in Mr. Boulez’s “Après ‘L’Artisanat Furieux’ ” offered a welcome respite.

That shift, along with the notion of challenged expectations that it indicated, was surely the point of the program. Yet even as I contemplated my responses, I consistently admired the sterling work done by the musicians involved, including the conductor, Steven Schick, the ensemble’s first artist in residence this season.

Highlights that deserve mention include the virtuosic whimsy demonstrated by Jessica Aszodi, a mezzo-soprano, in Cage’s “Aria”; the tonal beauty and exacting technique shown by the flutist Eric Lamb in Cage’s Solo for flute from Concert for Piano and Orchestra; and the stardust-dappled constellation of sounds conjured during Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis” by the players onstage and guest musicians scattered throughout the darkened hall. Still, it was as a provocative whole that the concert made its strongest impact.”

May 29 2017

Tough Assignment for an Accidental Conductor

By Steve Smith, The New York Times
Originally published September 2, 2011; full text and original article visible here.

“WELL before “Nine Rivers,” a major work by the Scottish avant-garde composer James Dillon, was given its premiere by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow last November it had acquired a singular reputation. Interviewed in The Telegraph, a London newspaper, Mr. Dillon referred to his nine-part cycle as “the most canceled premiere ever.” Five previous attempts to mount it had been called off, casualties of its elaborate technical requirements, daunting difficulty and four-hour duration.

The sixth too almost derailed. Just a week before the concert, meant to commemorate Mr. Dillon’s 60th birthday, the conductor withdrew because of illness. Just when it seemed that all hope was lost, an unlikely savior emerged. Steven Schick, a virtuoso percussionist long associated with the New York composers’ collective Bang on a Can and a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the percussion ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish, volunteered to conduct the premiere.

Mr. Schick was no newcomer to Mr. Dillon’s music. In 2000 Mr. Schick had given the premiere of “La Coupure,” the hourlong solo piece for percussion and electronics that forms the midpoint of “Nine Rivers,” and was set to reprise the performance in Glasgow. His offer to conduct the entire piece was bold, even reckless, since he had been conducting only since 2006, when, as a neophyte, he made his podium debut as a guest of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, a community ensemble associated with the university.

Mr. Schick, 57, who became the La Jolla Symphony’s music director in 2007, laughed gently as he recalled the experience during a recent interview at a cafe in Morningside Heights.

“In the same way that I’d started conducting the orchestra,” he said, “I thought to myself: How hard could it be?”

Harder than he thought, he confessed. In the end Mr. Schick was engaged to conduct the four movements of “Nine Rivers” following “La Coupure,” with two other conductors overseeing earlier sections for chamber ensemble and chorus. Mr. Schick flew to London to consult with Mr. Dillon in advance of the concert and saw most of the scores for the first time then, in a hotel lobby. “Three days later I was standing in front of the BBC Scottish, working,” he said.

In a telephone interview Mr. Dillon described watching the rehearsals with what he likened to an anthropologist’s curiosity as the suspicious orchestra took Mr. Schick’s measure. “Within an hour and a half they were eating out of his hands,” Mr. Dillon said. “Musicians can smell other good musicians, and they just knew that he was basically a very good musician.”

On Sept. 14, 16 and 17 Mr. Schick, who called the critically hailed premiere “the most fantastic experience I hope never to repeat,” will plunge still deeper into Mr. Dillon’s magnum opus, conducting ICE, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Crossing, a Philadelphia chamber choir, in the American premiere of “Nine Rivers” at the Miller Theater. The event, jointly produced with Works & Process at the Guggenheim, divides the work across three evenings, largely to get around its need for two adjacent performance spaces, one to accommodate the elaborate staging of “La Coupure.”

The performances build on a fruitful bond between Mr. Schick and ICE, forged in a 2009 Xenakis concert at the Miller Theater and cemented in a triumphant collaboration in “Varèse: (R)evolution” at the 2010 Lincoln Center Festival. More work lies ahead: At the Kitchen in October, Mr. Schick will lead the ensemble in works Varèse created for jazz musicians in the 1950s. A Miller Theater portrait of the composer and trombonist George Lewis, Mr. Schick’s former San Diego colleague, will follow in November.

Claire Chase, ICE’s executive director and flutist, likened the group’s connection with Mr. Schick to a love affair.

“One of the many remarkable things about working with him is that he improves every rehearsal,” she said in an interview. “This not to say that he isn’t always insanely prepared. But unlike many conductors his preparation is never a barrier to the fluidity and democracy of ideas in a rehearsal. He’s always looking for new pathways into the music, and he’s also always open to having his mind changed.”

Mr. Schick’s influence continues to spread. Newly appointed the artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, he will supervise five fascinating programs of modernist staples and premieres for his inaugural season. Meanwhile, at the La Jolla Symphony, he will oversee a Stravinsky-based season, conducting “Le Sacre du Printemps” and “Les Noces” along with works by Mozart, Verdi and David Lang.

Mixing contemporary works and standard-repertory pieces was already part of the orchestra’s mission when he arrived, Mr. Schick said. Embracing that philosophy, he sprinkled uncompromising modern works, including premieres, throughout each of his seasons, to unfailing audience approval.

“I wonder if people realize in the typical symphony orchestra paradigm how anesthetizing it is to an audience to be given the explicit or inferred message that ‘you’re probably not up to this,’ ” Mr. Schick said. “If you say to somebody: ‘Look, we’re not doing this for a grant or because we feel we should. We do it because we love it and because you are our audience, you are the people we’d like to share this with’ — something as simple as a gesture of friendship like this, I’ve never seen people that don’t respond.”

What earned the fledgling conductor the role of music director, said Diane Salisbury, La Jolla Symphony’s executive director, was his knack for inspiring the performers.

“When you have a community orchestra, where people are volunteering their time and showing up every Monday night after a long day as a radiologist or oceanographer or whatever they’re doing, you need someone who can actually bring out the best work with that orchestra,” Ms. Salisbury said from San Diego. “By his inaugural concert, it was his orchestra.”

Mr. Schick’s swift rise to podium authority was even more remarkable for having been unplanned. An omnivorously intellectual, ceaselessly philosophical son of nonmusical Iowa farmers, he explained that for a contemporary percussionist coming of professional age in the early 1970s goal-oriented career planning was an alien notion. He laughed off a question about whether he aims for more prominent orchestras.

“I’m the one without a manager or Web site,” he said. “I’ve never had that. I’ve always either created or responded to fascinating musical ideas. And where I’ve ended up has been pretty interesting, so I’ll probably just keep doing that.

“But if the New York Philharmonic wants to talk,” he added after a pause, “I’m certainly happy to take their call.””