Islandia Music Records to Release Steven Schick's SOUNDLINES - Second Volume in Weather Systems

Islandia Music Records announces Weather Systems II – Soundlines: On Language and the Land, the second in a three-volume series from “one of the great percussion virtuosos of our time” (San Francisco Chronicle) Steven Schick. Weather Systems is a set of recordings of the percussion music that has been most meaningful to Schick, which spans more than 100 years and features a diverse set of composers. Weather Systems II – Soundlines: On Language and the Land will be released on December 1, 2023. The final installment of this recording project, Weather Systems III: It's About Time, is expected in 2026 and will be an up-close look at rhythm as an ode to future musicians.

 

Soundlines: On Language and the Land, which also marks Schick's 70th birthday, is centered around his 700 mile walk up the California coast in 2006. Schick reflects on this journey as “a real moment of change in which my musical life and the natural world really started to speak to each other,” prompting a different approach to and understanding of percussion playing. The 3-CD set features highly contrasting works for percussion by Iannis Xenakis (Psappha), Vivian Fung (The Ice is Talking), George Lewis (Soundlines), Lei Liang (Trans), Frederic Rzewski (To the Earth), Vinko Globokar (Toucher), Roger Reynolds (Here and There), and Sarah Hennies (Thought Sectors), which all musically reveal deeper truths of the world.

 

Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick has championed contemporary percussion music by commissioning or premiering more than one hundred-fifty new works. 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. Soundlines: On Language and the Land is an echo of Schick's walk up the California coast: a musical changing of perspectives and connection with the world. In his liner notes, Schick writes, “Each [of these recordings] presents layered emotions in which a humorous façade dissolves to reveal deeper truths.”

 

The 700 mile journey on foot also had another motivation. Schick writes, “Although my walk from San Diego to San Francisco began as an exploration of sound and sonic cultures, it soon shifted to a more important goal. I was in love and I wanted to marry my girlfriend Brenda, who was living then in the Bay Area. . .  I was full of music but also full of love—for her and for the land I was crossing to reach her. The California coast may not have been the wine-dark sea of Homer, but for me it was the pathway to a future where music served life and not the other way around. With this realization, I did not minimize the position of music in my life, but rather safeguarded it. For those who wonder how Brenda answered my proposal: We have been married for 16 years.”

 

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.”

 

Soundlines forms the basis for the pivotal journey of musical rediscovery and reframing. The album's titular work by George Lewis tells of Schick's seven-week trek from San Diego to San Francisco. Schick writes:

 

George Lewis has told my story in his extraordinary Soundlines, a work for speaking percussionist, ensemble, and electronics, using a narrative I wrote as the basis of his libretto. From its happy-go-lucky beginnings—I really did just start walking north one day—through moments of crisis and realization, George created a Radio Play, a Hörspiel, which in the German tradition is both light and dark; family entertainment and high drama. He included details of conversations along the way, a list of Native American tribes whose land I crossed on foot, and my own, ever-present, internal monologue. Soundlines points not just to the mechanics of a long walk but to the imperatives of a pilgrimage as a process of cleansing and reconciliation, a demarcation between how things had been and how they might yet be. George Lewis is one of the great creators of our time, as composer, author, advocate, and teacher. It is no surprise that in Soundlines he grasped the raptures and regrets of a long walk more clearly than did the walker himself.

 

Iannis Xenakis' Psappha written in 1975 for multi-percussion solo takes inspiration from the Greek poet Sappho, whose archaic form is the namesake of Xenakis' work. Since 1977, Schick estimates that he has performed Psappha over seven hundred times, allowing him to understand the piece as “fundamentally about the Sapphic voice.” By imagining the lost voices of Sapphos, Schick recorded Psappha surrounded by hanging gongs, which, “though never actually struck, reverberated sympathetically in a luminous halo of resonance.”

 

Vivian Fung's The Ice is Talking was written in 2018 as a reaction to the receding glaciers in her Canadian home. Performed on a block of ice, the percussionist embodies the anxieties and poignancies of Fung's work, all while playing on a disappearing instrument. But it is within these challenges that the deeper meanings of Fung's work becomes apparent. For Schick, “the cracking and dripping of melting are miniature and poignant echoes of the loud booming and zinging of warming spring ice on the midwestern lakes of my childhood. Alas, the ice begins truly to sing only as it is dying.”

 

Lei Liang's Trans, written in 2014, engages with the natural world, using beach stones to create clouds of sounds. Amidst these environmental sonorities created by his undergraduate students at University of California, San Diego, Schick lays down his virtuosic solo.

 

Frederic Rzewski's To the Earth (1985) draws on the Homeric Hymn “To Earth Mother of All,” a prayer to the Greek goddess of the Earth. With flowerpots as solo instruments, the text and percussion embody Earth's fragility and the precariousness of humanity.

 

Composed in 1973, Toucher by Vinko Globokar uses French translations from Berthold Brecht's eponymous play. Originally based on Galileo's persecution from the Catholic Church, Schick writes, “my first conversations with Vinko informed an interpretation of the piece as a paean to the soixante-huitards, the Parisian protesters of 1968 who struck against consumerism and imperialism.” Whether about Galileo or the soixante-huitards, Toucher musically depicts the stark differences between the powerful and powerless.

 

Described by Schick as a “daringly barren soundscape,” Roger Reynolds' Here and There (2018) sets bass drum, large tam-tam, and vibraphone to spoken word. Drawing on Samuel Beckett's “Text for Nothing IX,” Here and There probes Beckett's contemplation on birth and death with intimately immediate percussion. The performance is the culmination of an over thirty year friendship and collaboration with Reynolds and Schick.

 

At almost an hour in length, Sarah Hennies' Thought Sectors (2020) closes Schick's album with an internal landscape. Through large sections of repetition, small absences, changes, and perturbations in the reiterations coagulate into meaning. As Schick writes, through Thought Sectors, “details normally too small to be distinguishable in the cascade of faster moving music begin to come alive.”

 

More About Steven Schick: Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he 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. Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 2014.

 

Steven Schick 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.

 

Steven Schick: Weather Systems II – Soundlines: On Language and the Land

Islandia Music Records

Release Date: December 1, 2023

 

Disc I

Iannis Xenakis: Psappha (1975) (14:23)

Vivian Fung: The Ice is Talking (2018) (11:40)

**George Lewis: Soundlines (A Dreaming Track) (2019) (30:14)

 

Disc II

Lei Liang: Trans (2014) (15:04)

Frederic Rzewski: To the Earth (1985) (9:17)

Vinko Globokar: Toucher (1973) (9:30)

*Roger Reynolds: Here and There (2018) (30:51)

 

Disc III

Sarah Hennies: Thought Sectors (2020) (57:43)

 

**The International Contemporary Ensemble

Steven Schick, Solo Percussion and Voice, Conductor

David Byrd-Marrow, Horn

Rebekah Heller, Bassoon

Katinka Kleijn, Cello

Josh Modney, Violin

Erin Rogers, Saxophone

Joshua Rubin, Clarinet

Ross Karre, Percussion

George Lewis, Sound Processing and Sound Design

Soundlines Software by Damon Holzborn

 

Soundlines (A Dreaming Track) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Gustavo Dudamel Music & Artistic Director, and the International Contemporary Ensemble with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

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