SAN DIEGO — What do Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren have in common with acclaimed percussion master, orchestral conductor and University of California San Diego music professor Steven Schick, a 2014 Percussion Hall of Fame inductee?
Stylistically speaking, very little. Unless, that is, Wonder, Rundgren and McCartney each begins exclusively performing a cutting-edge repertoire of intensely demanding contemporary music by visionary 20th-century composers. More specifically, compositions of artistic daring that require a performer to possess instrumental brilliance, pinpoint dynamic control and an ability to capture the emotional essence in even the knottiest music.
Happily, Schick's captivating new album, "Weather Systems I: A Hard Rain," places him directly alongside Wonder, McCartney and Rundgren in at least one key way.
In their shared quest for artistic excellence, each of the three pop-music legends has recorded landmark albums on which they perform all or nearly all their instrumental and vocal parts single-handedly.
Schick does the same on "A Hard Rain," which will be released Friday, albeit minus any conventional songs or conventional singing. Then, he goes them one better — or to be more accurate, many, many times better.
Wonder, McCartney and Rundgren have performed on as many as a dozen instruments, each, on some of their one-man albums. On "A Hard Rain," a dozen instruments is the fewest Schick plays on any single selection — specifically, on William Hibbard's simultaneously demanding and witty "Parsons' Piece."
But that's a comparative cakewalk compared to the nearly 200 instruments Schick plays on John Cage's epic, nearly 30-minute long, 27'10.544" for a percussionist.
Using recording technology that was never imagined by Cage, who died in 1992 at the age of 79, Schick and ace audio engineer Andrew Munsey — himself an accomplished jazz drummer — transform Cage's work into something even more bold and multifaceted.
84-channel multitrack collage
The result is an 84-channel multitrack collage that Schick eloquently describes in "A Hard Rain's" liner notes as: "a rainforest of sounds: of water, earth, and air; of rip-sawn wood and ancient metal."
Never one for convention, even in the most proudly unconventional musical settings, Schick extends Cage's piece by 46 seconds from the 27-minute, 10-second length denoted in its title. He manages to do so without changing the structure of the piece beyond its original 10,000 beats, which comprised 100 phrases of 100 beats each.
Intrigued by the extra 47 seconds in Schick's tour-de-force version of Cage's 27'10.544", I asked him to explain.
Schick responded, via email: "The length of the Cage (piece) is due to the fact that we let the last note ring out, so even though it comes in time the resonance lasts for a while.
"The way I constructed the recording strategy assures that every note (in the Cage piece) is within .15 seconds of where it is assigned in the score. It was a crazy process involving a click-track and four layers of recordings that are ultimately overlaid."
What makes "A Hard Rain" so enticing — much like Schick's work as a soloist and with New York's Bang on a Can All-Stars and the UCSD-based red fish blue fish — is his unerring ability to make even the most complex and demanding music sound inviting. Ditto his making rhythms sound lyrical and turning percussive accents, nuances and flourishes into artistic statements, while using silences to enhance the notes that come before or after.
Schick does this throughout "A Hard Rain." A sweeping double album, it will be available digitally and in physical form through the New York-based boutique label Islandia Music Records. Islandia was founded by cellist and producer Maya Beiser, who met Schick several decades ago. She has given him the freedom to make his latest solo release exactly as he wanted.
A highlight is Schick's heady reinvention of Kurt Schwitters' nearly 32-minute opus, "Ursonata," which features interactive technology designed and performed by UCSD music professor Shahrokh Yadegari. The instrumentation by Schick is entirely generated by his voice, as words, vowels and consonants are elongated, compressed and reconfigured with a finely calibrated mixture of exacting accuracy and improvisational fire.
Which is which? Where does the notated score end and the spontaneous flights flights of fancy begin? The apparent answers might differ for each listener.
Evoking Indian scat singing
Schick's ear-bending delivery at times suggests the Indian scat singing tradition known as konnakol, even when the words he is delivering are in German. He does so with a dazzling virtuosity that — especially in the fourth movement's rapid-fire cadenza — seems physically impossible for most mere mortals to achieve.
No less impressive is Schick's performance of Hibbard's "Parsons' Piece," which clocks in at a comparatively brisk 10 minutes and 53 seconds.
Lesser artists tackling this 1966 composition by Hibbard may have been challenged to capture its theatricality in a studio. The score directs performers to employ grand visual gestures when striking certain percussion instruments — although which instruments, and when, is left up to the performer.
Schick and recording engineer Munsey are able to capture the intentionality Hibbard wanted. They do so even without having had anyone present in the studio to appreciate the visual aspects.
For those thinking "A Hard Rain's" title is an homage to Bob Dylan, think again. The title stems from Schick's experiences growing up on a rural Iowa farm, not from Dylan's classic 1962 song, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
This handsomely packaged double album also features percussion compositions by such esteemed composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Charles Wuorinen and Helmut Lachenmann. Each was pivotal for Schick as young musician. They remain so today for him at 68.
The COVID-19 pandemic shutdown provided unplanned time for Schick to woodshed on the exotic array of percussion instruments he keeps close at hand in his garage studio.
He decided to revisit some of the pieces he first studied and played decades ago as a rising solo percussion dynamo. Schick performs them anew on "A Hard Rain," with the added benefit of the musical maturity that only comes with age and experience.
Or, as he writes in "A Hard Rain's" liner notes: "In the lockdown, I quickly found that what I missed most was not the excitement of the stage but the rituals of the practice room. Perhaps the exactitude of practicing was a necessary antidote to the chaos of the historical moment. So, in a version of the Hindustani chilla katna, which prizes solitude and reflection over execution and accomplishment, I relearned the art of practicing, tentatively at first and later more probingly.
"With no concert to prepare for, practicing was released from practicality. ... My goal was simple: to strengthen what served the emotional and physical language of my art and to discard what did not. The preparations for this recording of the foundational works for solo percussion, many of which I have played for nearly 50 years, ignited an intense dialogue with my much younger self, the percussionist in his early 20s who had learned this music in the first place.
"I was curious: How did that young percussionist make essential decisions? Why as a near beginner did he choose to play the thorniest and most difficult works of the modernist repertoire? How did he decode unconventional notation? Why did he take this approach, at that tempo, with those mallets? And what did he imagine his future to be?"
Most of the answers are disclosed on "A Hard Rain."
A labor of love, it was recorded between January and April 2020 in UCSD's Studio A. The music that was captured cannot be listened to casually. But for those with the time to take a deep dive, attentive airings will deliver aural payoffs well worth the effort.
Schick's meticulous execution and ability to perform with equal degrees of understatement and fury — sometimes within the same piece or even the same measure — is a marvel throughout. So is the rich tapestry of tonal colors and sonic textures he produces. Like few others, Schick can inject an air of mystery and drama by expertly striking a drum, cymbal, gong, cowbell, tambourine, or any other percussion instrument of any size that is at hand.
"A Hard Rain" represents the start of the next chapter for Schick, who in June will conclude his 15-year tenure as the music director of the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus.
Schick has already nearly completed his next album, which is set for release in 2023. It will feature music composed by Iannis Xenakis, George Lewis, Pamela Z, Vivian Fung, Sarah Hennies and Schick's fellow UCSD professor Roger Reynolds, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for music.
What comes after that next album remains to be heard. But for an artist who is as comfortable leading a symphony orchestra as he is seated bare-chested on a concert stage and using his body as a percussion instrument, anything seems within reach for Steven Schick.
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