Biographies
Steven Schick | Paul Dresher | Rinde Eckert
Matt Heckert | Daniel Schmidt | Tom Ontiveros
Steven Schick, percussionist
Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher. He studied at the University of Iowa and received the Soloists Diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany. Steven Schick has commissioned and premiered more than one hundred new works for percussion and has performed these pieces on major concert series such as Lincoln Center's Great Performers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella concerts as well as in international festivals including Warsaw Autumn, the BBC Proms, the Jerusalem Festival, the Holland Festival, the Stockholm International Percussion Event and the Budapest Spring Festival among many others. He has recorded many of those works for SONY Classical, Wergo, Point, CRI, Neuma and Cantaloupe Records. He has been regular guest lecturer at the Rotterdam Conservatory, and the Royal College of Music in London. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and a “Consulting Artist in Percussion” at the Manhattan School of Music. Schick was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002. From 2000 to 2004, he served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland and is the founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, “red fish blue fish.” In 2007 Steven Schick assumed the post of Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus.
In 2006 Schick released three important publications. His book on solo percussion music, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” was published in May by the University of Rochester Press; his recording of “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” by John Luther Adams was released at the same time by Cantaloupe Music; and, a DVD release in collaboration with the percussion group, red fish blue fish, of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis has been released by Mode Records.
Paul Dresher, composer
Born in Los Angeles, Paul Dresher played rock guitar as a teenager. He received a B.A. in Music from U.C. Berkeley and his M.A. in Composition from U.C. San Diego where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands. He has had a long time interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanaian drumming with C.K. and Kobla Ladzekpo and Hindustani classical music with Nikhil Banerjee, as well as Balinese and Javanese music. Dresher has received commissions from the Library of Congress, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, the California EAR Unit, and the American Music Theater Festival, among others. As Artistic Director of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, he has guided the creation of the American Trilogy, a set of experimental operatic works that address different facets of American culture, in collaboration with writer/performer Rinde Eckert. The trilogy began with Slow Fire (1985-88), developed with Power Failure (1988-89), and was completed in 1990 with Pioneer, a collaboration that included visual artist Terry Allen, actress Jo Harvey Allen, tenor John Duykers, and director Robert Woodruff. Most recently, he composed the chamber opera The Tyrant, in collaboration with librettist Jim Lewis, and featuring John Duykers. The production, which premiered to rave reviews in Seattle, will have a week long run in May 2005 as a co-presentation of the Cleveland Opera and the Cleveland Playhouse.
Rinde Eckert, librettist/director
Rinde Eckert, the 2009 recipient of The Alpert Award in the Arts for his contributions to Theatre and finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a writer, composer, performer and director. His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America, and to major festivals in Europe and Asia.
Eckert’s career began as a writer/performer in the 1980’s, writing librettos for Paul Dresher (Pioneer, Power Failure, Slow Fire, Ravenshead). Working subsequently with choreographers Margaret Jenkins and Sarah Shelton Mann, he began composing dance scores, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Eckert began composing and performing his own music/theater pieces with The Gardening of Thomas D, his 1992 homage to Dante which was performed on tour in the United States and France. His staged works for solo performer include An Idiot Divine, Romeo Sierra Tango and Quit This House. He wrote Shoot the Moving Things and Four Songs Lost in a Wall for radio. Rinde Eckert’s recent writing credits include Horizon (2007-08 Drama Desk Nominations: Best Play and Best Director, Lucille Lortel Award: "Unique Theatrical Experience"); Orpheus X (Pulitzer Prize nomination); Highway Ulysses and Four Songs Lost in a Wall (The American Academy of Arts and Letters 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award); And God Created Great Whales (OBIE Award: Best Performance, Drama Desk Nomination: "Unique Theatrical Experience"); and the two, one-act plays An Idiot Divine.
His work for the theater has been produced by American Repertory Theatre, The Foundry Theatre, Culture Project, Center Stage in Baltimore, Dobama Theatre Company and Berkeley Repertory Theater. Tony Taccone, Robert Woodruff, David Schweizer, Richard ET White and Ellen McLaughlin have directed his plays. Rinde Eckert has directed his own and others’ plays and operas for The Asia Society, Juggernaut Theater, Opera Piccola and the Paul Dresher Ensemble.
Current writing and directing projects include: The Schick Machine with virtuoso percussionist Steven Schick in a solo-theater work composed/produced by Paul Dresher; Slide with composer/guitarist Steven Mackey and eighth blackbird debuts in June 2009 at the Ojai Festival and will tour nationally in 2010; and Imaginary City with So Percussion debuts in Fall 2009 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Previous new music collaborations include Sound Stage for the ensemble Zeitgeist, and Steven Mackey’s oratorio Dream House. Mackey and Eckert are members of BIG FARM, the 4-person ‘prog-rock’ band. Rinde Eckert’s uniquely eclectic music is available on the Intuition label in Germany and through Songline/Tonefield Productions. The critically acclaimed Sandhills Reunion (music by Jerry Granelli, text by Eckert) was released in 2005.
Following his success teaching a course in creativity at Princeton University in 2007, Eckert begins a 3-year residency in Spring 2009. He was the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence at the University of California at Davis Department of Theater and Dance where he wrote and directed Fate and Spinoza, and is currently in partnership with the University of Iowa to create, direct and perform in Eye Piece, a play exploring the loss of vision. Rinde Eckert lives in New York with his wife, Ellen McLaughlin, the playwright and actress.
Matt Heckert, mechanical sound artist
Matt Heckert has been working as a performance-sound artist and an engineer since 1978. He is one of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a trio of artists including Mark Pauline and Eric Werner, that pioneered the use of machines, robots and pyrotechnics in performance art. His contribution to SRL's spectacular machine performances included the creation of various remote and radio controlled robot vehicles as well as the creation of elaborate and innovative soundtracks incorporating everything from industrial noise to dialogue from b-movies. SRL staged performances in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Copenhagen Denmark and Amsterdam Holland.
In 1989 he conceived and developed a group of sound producing machines know as the Mechanical Sound Orchestra. With Mechanical Sound Orchestra performances all sound is produced by mechanical action of the machines with no use of sampled or pre-recorded sound. Heckert utilizes machine forms in such a way as to suggest a degree of personality and even dramatic interaction among the various moving elements. Rather than conveying the utopian vision characteristic of the modern machine aesthetic, however, Heckert endows his sculptures with simple motor functions that suggest hysterical or Sisyphean behavior. Heckert performed with Mechanical Sound Orchestra throughout the United States and Europe in festivals and galleries including the "Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival" Oslo, Norwa; Germans Van Eck Gallery NYC; "Sonambiente-Festival for Eyes and Ears" Berlin, Germany; "Performing Bodies and Smart Machines Series" Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.
For the past several years he has been concentrating on sound installations of multiples: "Birds" 1999 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and "Rotifiers" 2003 Catherine Clark Gallery San Francisco. "Birds" was a computer controlled sound installation of 26 identical machines made up of a thin sheet of aluminum, 2' x 7', and a servo motor.
Heckert has won several art grants and awards for his work as a sound artist including:
1997 Prix ARS Electronica- Linz, Austria, Golden Nica for Computer Music
1996 Prix ARS Electronica - Linz, Austria, Distinction for Computer Music
1991 Western States Art Federation/NEA Sculpture fellowship
1991 New Langton Arts/NEA, San Francisco, CA Interarts Grant
1988 Golden Reel Award for soundtrack to film "A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief"
Heckert has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University and University of California, Davis. Currently, Heckert is helping to build a chocolate factory in San Francisco.
Daniel Schmidt, instrument inventor and builder
Daniel Schmidt is a musical instrument designer, inventor, composer and educator. He has collaborated with Paul Dresher for many years. In the last decade they have created the Quadrachord as well as the instruments for Sound Stage. Daniel is well known for his contribution to creating the genre known as American Gamelan, broadening the range and timbral palette of traditional Indonesian designs and making the instruments more well-suited to the western compositional approach. Daniel has just finished a permanent installation of unique instruments at Children's Fairyland in Oakland.
His inventions have been exhibited at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, the San Francisco Art Institute, New Langton Arts, EXPO '86 in Vancouver, Dartington College in England, and the Cornish Institute in Seattle. He has built musical instruments for John Cage with the Boston Symphony, John Adams and the San Francisco Symphony, and worked closely with Lou Harrison on a number of projects. He has long been a leader in the field of American Gamelan & Javanese music, and in that capacity has directed performances or had residencies at the Oakland Museum, the Exploratorium, New Music America in San Francisco and Los Angeles, UC Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, and the Berliner Kunstler Program (DAAD). As an educator he has taught instrument building and musical acoustics from the elementary through the graduate level at such institutions as the Cazadero Summer Music Camp, UC Berkeley, East Bay School of the Arts, East Bay Science and Arts Middle School, the Aurora School in Oakland, Sonoma State University, and UC Santa Barbara. He has collaborated with numerous choreographers and dancers including Anita Feldman, for whom he built a special tap-dance floor, and Joanne Kelley with the San Francisco Ballet. Articles by and/or about his work have been published in Experimental Musical Instruments, EAR Magazine, Soundings, Percussive Arts Journal and the New Grove Dictionary of Music. He has received grants from the NEA, Meet the Composer, and the California Arts Council
He currently teaches at Mills College. When asked how he got started building musical instruments of his own design, Daniel answered, "as a teenager I saw a small aulos and replicated it from memory out of sheer intrigue. Instrument design and building have remained my focus ever since."
Tom Ontiveros, production and lighting design
Tom Ontiveros has focused on visual design for new and premier works by composers including Paul Dresher, Mark Grey, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (Santa Cruz Civic); playwrights Naomi Iizuka, Charles Mee and Jessica Hagedorn; choreographers Allyson Green, Yolande Snaith, Mark Haim, and Scott Wells. Touring work includes productions in The Holland Festival, The International Festival of Arts & Ideas and The International Theatre Festival in Cluj, Romania, as well as national tours with The Paul Dresher Ensemble for Ravenshead, Slow Fire, and Soundstage. Other collaborations include works with Michael Grief, Bob Balaban, Eduardo Machado and Erin Mee. Tom is an Assistant Professor of Design at California State University, Chico. Design Credits include: Most Wanted (La Jolla Playhouse); The Exonerated (Culture Project-New York Premiere); The Tyrant (Paul Dresher Ensemble); Enemy Slayer (Phoenix Symphony); Unstoppable (St. Joseph Ballet); Garden of Lila, Garden of Deadly Sound, Garden of Forbidden Loves, Animan (IMAGOmoves); Sweet 15 (San Diego Rep); My Old Lady, Visions of Kerouac, Indiscretions, Candida (Marin Theatre Company); Miss Julie, Women Center Stage (Culture Project); Full Circle (Danspace); A Dance Party (Joyce SOHO); Veils, VestigesŠ (Ontological-Hysteric); First Love, Schrodinger's Girlfriend (Dean Goodman Award), Summertime (Magic Theatre); Contagion, Funny House of a Negro (Dean Goodman Award), The Language of Angels (Intersection for The Arts); Tattoo Girl (Sledgehammer).