New Multi-Album Series WEATHER SYSTEMS to Begin Releases on May 20th

Islandia Music Records announces a new multi-album series from "supreme living virtuoso" (The New Yorker) percussionist Steven Schick. The new series, called Weather Systems, is a set of recordings of the percussion music that has been most meaningful to Schick, which will span more than 100 years and feature a diverse set of composers. Weather Systems I: A Hard Rain will be released on May 20, 2022, and includes foundational modernist works for solo percussion by John Cage (27'10.554"), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Zyklus), Morton Feldman (The King of Denmark), Charles Wuorinen (Janissary Music), Helmut Lachenmann (Intérieur I), William Hibbard (Parsons' Piece), and Kurt Schwitters (Ursonata) with Shakrokh Yadegari, electronics composer and performer. The 2-CD set includes an extensive personal essay written by Schick. The next album in Schick's series, Weather Systems II-Radio Plays: Music for Speaking Percussionist, will be released in 2023, and will include music by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z, and Roger Reynolds.

Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick has championed contemporary percussion music by commissioning or premiering more than one hundred-fifty new works. The most important of these have become core repertory for solo percussion. The title of his series, Weather Systems, and the first album, A Hard Rain, reflect Schick's background growing up in a farming family in Iowa, always having one eye on the weather and in particular, on the rain. In his liner notes, he describes the way a deluge can lead to rebirth and relates that to his experience of the pandemic. "As I once learned to value erosion - the earth's way of forgetting and cleansing - I am grateful that many of the trails I tramped habitually in a life-time of professional concert-giving have been washed away," he writes.

Weather Systems will be released on Islandia Music Records, the record label of cellist and producer Maya Beiser. Beiser says, "Steve Schick and I met 30 years ago, in New York City. Both of us were involved with the Bang on a Can festival, we became founding members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Steve is a true virtuoso, possessing a rare artistic force which melds rigorous discipline with mesmerizing, hypnotic performance energy. Over the years we have collaborated on many different projects and remained close friends and artistic confidants. I am so thankful for the opportunity to help bring this monumental project to fruition with Islandia Music Records."

The genesis of A Hard Rain came during the pandemic, when Schick found himself practicing for practice's sake, rather than for an end goal. In the process he revisited a younger version of himself, at the age that he learned these foundational masterpieces. He writes:

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 fifty years, ignited an intense dialogue with my much younger self, the percussionist in his early 20's 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?

Schick's recording of John Cage's 27'10.554" for a percussionist (1956) on this album is an 84-channel multitrack collage, which Schick describes as, "a rainforest of sounds: of water, earth, and air; of rip-sawn wood and ancient metal." The piece was the last in Cage's The Ten Thousand Things project, his open-ended set of pieces that could be performed in any combination.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger or Cycle for a Percussionist, was written in 1959 and was one of the first major works for a percussion soloist using multiple percussion instruments. Schick describes it as the composer's attempt to make, in the aftermath of World War II, "a habitat suitable for conversations among different sounds not a site of contention among differing people."

Morton Feldman's The King of Denmark from 1964 is the centerpiece of the album. The graphic score allows the performer to choose the instruments, and largely the pitches and rhythms as well. Schick estimates he has made at least twenty versions of the piece. The version he has recorded here includes numerous musical references to friends, both living and lost over the past two years.

Charles Wuorinen's Janissary Music was written in 1966. Schick found new a new relationship with the work during his time in the practice room in 2020. He writes, "I made my peace with it last year, and posthumously also with Charles, managing to find a surprising amount of joy and not merely back pain in its polyphonic acrobatics."

Helmut Lachenmann's Intérieur I, also from 1966, creates and explores an "interior" of mind and sound in multiple layers, with the instruments surrounding the percussionist. Schick describes the piece as, "an extended excavation project where through scraping and rubbing the percussionist tries to get inside the monolith of percussive sound."

William Hibbard's 1968 work Parsons' Piece was composed when he was Music Director of the University of Iowa's Center for New Music. Schick describes it as "the first serious work I ever learned." In revisiting the work in 2020, he writes of hearing it new ways, saying, "I found a deeper voice in the luminous resonance of gongs, cymbals, bass drums and cowbells - at once and lush and elegiac."

Kurt Schwitters's famous Ursonata from 1922-32 is a tour-de-force, 45-minute "sonata in primal sounds," as the composer wrote. Schick's recording uses interactive technology designed and performed by Shakrokh Yadegari. Schick writes of his recent time with this piece, "I heard more clearly than ever that the comical non-sense of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonata is actually the language of crisis, where, for example, the German word for rocket, Rakete, collides with an inside-out spelling of the name of the soon-to-be-destroyed city of Dresden ('dedesnn nn rrrr')."

More about Steven Schick:

Steven Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 2014. He is artistic director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and previously, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. As a conductor, he has appeared with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble.

Schick's publications include a book, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, and many articles. He has released numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis, and its companion, The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (both on Mode). He received the "Diapason d'Or" as conductor (Xenakis Ensemble Music with ICE) and the Deutscheschallplattenkritikpreis, as percussionist (Stockhausen), each for the best new music release of 2015.

Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and holds the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego. He was music director of the 2015 Ojai Festival, and co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Music Program at the Banff Centre from 2017-2019.

About Islandia Music Records:

Islandia Music Records is an independent record label founded and spearheaded by cellist and producer Maya Beiser, one of the foremost soloists and avant-garde artists of her generation. Beiser's desire to be the driving force behind her artistic expression led her to concentrate on an intensely rich and innovative solo career. She has engaged composers, choreographers, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, sound designers, and technology innovators to create works written for her or by her and interpreted through her singular artistic lens. The freedom to chart her own course made it possible to become a game changer in the contemporary creative landscape. A platform for self-expression and daring artistic adventures, Islandia Music Records allows for a broad palette of collaborative patterns: between the old and the new, the brazen and the subtle, the dark and the hopeful.

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