I've known Steve Schick since the 1980s, when I was myself
still an active percussionist, and I have fond memories of those days,
especially associated with great concerts of whatever new music he was learning
at the time, but also of intense conversations about music, literature, good
food and drink, and so on. His sense of personal style is something I also
remember and that still is certainly the case. As someone who has been wearing
a flannel shirt over a T-shirt and jeans since graduate school, I've always
admired his taste, whether it be his choice of shoes--were they always Italian?
Regardless I remember nothing but leather--or even more noticeable his designer
eyewear, which seems to be different every time I see him. In other words, a
stylish and classy guy who also happens to be one of his generation's greatest
musicians. That he is also a percussionist, well, maybe this seems not so
unusual now with so many fine percussionists working as conductors (Steve does
too nowadays), becoming composers (which is, in addition to writing, what I do
now), or just participating as percussionists in a world that accepts
percussion music as not just normal but often with an appreciation of it as
something really spectacular. But back when I was a student, which is only few
years later than when Steve was a student, percussionists were definitely, and
especially in the United States, decidedly in the "back of the bus"
musically, often literally, as one still sees in bands and orchestras
everywhere. Steve and I remained in touch when I stopped being a percussionist
and I really appreciated that contact. In fact, when he invited me to be part
of his Roots and Rhizomes festival at UCSD in 2005 it was the beginning of what
has since become a percussive "reawakening" for me that I've written
about elsewhere.
I'm writing this as an introduction to what follows, a
response to the two-concert retrospective Steve did at the Miller Theater last
week. You can see what Steve had to say about the concert, and about solo percussion, here:
I'm sometimes embarrassed by the overflow of emotion in written prose, at
least as it finds its way into my writing, which I make sure it rarely does.
And I sat on what I wrote below all week, thinking through my feelings about
sharing such a personal reaction to what was a set of concerts that ranks up
there with the very best I've ever seen. As I've written in a recent post, I've
been to tons of concerts so that's really saying something. Anyway, Steven
Schick definitely is a superstar in my book and I certainly don't intend the
use of "god" as in any way connected to acts of worship--more in line
with the famous example of 60s-London graffiti: "Eric Clapton is god."
Yes, it is exactly in this sense, and I'm guessing with the same passion that
listener felt about a Clapton performance, that I offer the following, written
one day after the concert series was over.
Steven Schick
Superstar
If the rock opera Jesus
Christ Superstar portrayed Jesus as a man, let's have this blog portray
Steven Schick as a god. Of percussion that is, or even more specifically, as
this is where he began: a god of solo percussion, a category Steve proclaimed this
past Friday (during a panel discussion) as possibly "dead." I'll have
more to say about that in a later blog entry. For now let's just say this: not
as long as Steven Schick is alive, that's for sure, and his two concerts at Columbia
University's Miller Theater last Thursday and Saturday were living proof, a
virtuosically performed overview of Steven's place in the pantheon of percussion
history and whose participation these many years played a large role in
bringing percussion, for better and worse, into the forefront (better) and
mainstream (worse) of music today. I'm
going to write about this latter category at another time and concentrate here solely
on the former.
After the panel discussion mentioned above I complimented
Steve on his performance of Stockhausen's Zyklus,
which I've heard him play many times. Here's a performance of him playing it
that I found on YouTube:
His Miller Theater performance of Zyklus was among the very best I've ever heard. He told me he had
"played the Stockhausen maybe eight hundred times at least," but
hadn't played it in the last ten years. He'd performed Xenakis's Psappha, also on the program, "even
more." Here's a video of Schick
playing Psappha:
During the Friday panel discussion Aiyun Huang, one of Schick's former students and now a
professor teaching percussion at McGill, commented about how the percussive
"standards" on the first concert were written for young men in their
twenties and Steve, at sixty, was still playing them. She meant this as, and I'm
sure it was taken as, a compliment. Truthfully, I know of no other person who
played (or plays) these pieces in later years. It was quite extraordinary for
me, someone not that much younger that Steve, to see him not only perform these
pieces, in and of itself a major accomplishment, but add new insights into
these pieces--a new awareness of what something like Zyklus and Psappha compositionally
is and how these are both great compositions deep enough to allow for
interpretive change over time. Like comparing Alfred Brendel's Beethoven piano
sonata recordings, early and late, both have their merits; both are necessary
to a complete understanding of Beethoven and Brendel. Same here: Zyklus and Psappha have many interpreters and interpretations. But how rare it
is to hear Steve Schick's interpretations of Zyklus and Psappha,
having myself heard them not hundreds but certainly dozens of times, and hear
those pieces as a history of piece and player combined. As great as the YouTube
performances of Steve playing Zyklus
and Psappha obviously are, my memory
of Steve playing these pieces last week will be the performances that stick
with me. Definitive then has, for me, become definitive now. You could hear the
history of those eight hundred performances, the power of that accumulation, in
what Steve played last weekend. As I'm sure anyone who was there will tell you,
it was an unforgettable experience.
Borrowing from Christian fundamentalists, not only is Steve
Schick a god, but an "awesome god," who "reigns from heaven
above." The real question to ask is, with Steve still going strong at
sixty, who dares ascend to the throne? Any takers? I didn't think so. So Steve,
in response to your wonderful performance last week, let me quote the words of
another young man who performed virtuosically in his twenties, and whom I wish
was still interpreting his own "standards":
"Sing on brother, play on drummer."
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