Steven Schick - USA
“Nice” can be defined as something—or someone—pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, kind, polite, and/or respectable. It can be a one-word summary of a musical experience featuring great precision or sensitive discernment. And when asked how he would like to be remembered, it is one of the words that 2014 PAS Hall of Fame inductee Steven Schick used to characterize himself and his musical legacy.
“I know ‘nice’ is a pallid word,” he says, “but to me it also means generous. I hope that composers will say that I gave their music its due, that students will say they had my attention when they wanted it, and that people who write me random emails will say, ‘He responded to me.’ I know it sounds silly, but if ‘nice’ is fleshed out to be worthy, considerate, friendly, and generous, then that is how I’d like to be remembered.”
His modest summary of a career that champions contemporary percussion music through performing, teaching, and conducting can be traced to his humble beginnings as the son of a farmer in Iowa. “I was a farm kid who never intended to be a musician,” Schick explains. “My uncle played drums in a rock band, which made it desirable for somebody like me. When the band director sent home a letter to all prospective band parents of elementary students, my mother noticed that parents didn’t have to buy an actual drum, just the sticks. My mother thought that was a good idea financially, so the instrument choice was really her decision!”
Schick played in the band at Clear Lake High School but did not receive any formal percussion instruction until his senior year when he took drum lessons from Don Keipp, a student teacher in nearby Mason City who would later become a classmate at the University of Iowa.
“I was going to be a doctor,” Schick says, “and enrolled in Luther College, which had a good wind ensemble. My plan was to go through pre-med training and play in the band for four years. But I ended up hanging out with all the musicians. I became really passionate about music and much less passionate about biology.”
After one year at Luther, Schick transferred to the University of Iowa as a music major, where he studied with Thomas L. Davis. “I credit Mr. Davis and my fantastic classmates for the validation that I was doing the right thing,” Schick says. “Don [Keipp, Professor Emeritus at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah] became a classmate, as well as John Beckford [Furman University], Richard McCandless [percussionist/composer] and Robyn Schulkowsky [percussion soloist in Europe], to name a few. Mr. Davis, an all-around percussionist who specialized in jazz vibes, was not a contemporary music specialist. But he gave me a solid technical base and never tried to bend me away from what I really wanted to do. I think about him so often with my own students, who sometimes want to do things other than what I do. I now realize how very generous that was.”
Schick earned his Bachelor of Music in Percussion Performance degree from the University of Iowa in 1976, followed by a Master of Music degree. His interest in contemporary percussion stemmed from the school’s Center for New Music, a performance organization devoted to then-late 20th-century repertoire, and originally funded by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Center, functioning as a laboratory for the university’s composers, took new music to a wide and diverse public, from schools to town forums in farming communities across the state.
“I remember hearing William Parsons, the percussionist with the group, play something by Stockhausen,” remembers Schick. “I realized this was a world I had no inkling even existed. This was the counterpart to the beginning of piano solo music in the late 18th century. And ‘wow!’ I was on the ground floor of something special. I didn’t always understand the music I played, but I certainly related to the idea that something important was being invented and discovered, and I could be a part of that.”
After graduating with his master’s in 1978, Schick nominally became a doctoral student, thanks to a combination of assistantships. “Essentially, I became the full-time—although poorly paid!—percussionist for the Center for New Music,” he states. “I stayed in Iowa in a kind of netherworld between being a faculty member and a student for three years. That was a great period of time in which I began to develop solo music and also formed a duo with [pianist] James Avery.”
In 1980, Schick won First Prize in a competition sponsored by the American Wind Symphony Orchestra. The following year, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany and enrolled in Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (State Academy of Music) in Freiberg, where he earned a Soloist’s Diploma in 1982. “Jim [Avery] left the Iowa faculty to go to Freiberg, and that was a good enough reason for me to pack up and follow him there,” explains Schick. “He is on my mind a lot lately because the last recording of Stockhausen pieces we made together before he died in 2009 was released last month.
“Being in Europe was an amazing experience,” he continues. “I was a part of the German percussion community, working with a lot of composers and performers. I won the Kranichstein Prize, an important award at the Darmstadt Summer Course, in 1982. I also met the second great teacher that I had, Bernhard Wulff, who was the ‘photographic negative’ of Mr. Davis! Whereas Mr. Davis was a wonderfully conservative musician in all the right ways, Bernhard was this crazy visionary whose imagination is almost unlimited. But they both revered a very strong basic technique. So contemporary music was never this crazy you-could-do-whatever-you-want-to thing; it mattered whether or not you could play a decent roll.”
Upon returning to the States from Germany, Schick and his then-wife Wendy spent a year in Washington, D.C. “I was minimally employed, teaching English as a second language, and practicing eight to ten hours a day,” he recalls. “It was a practice year and I needed it.”
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