Biographies

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.