The Ice is Talking (2018)

Rain Coming (1982)

Déserts (1950-54)

     I. 1st episode
     II. 1st interpolation of organized sound
     III. 2nd episode
     IV. 2nd interpolation
     V. 3rd episode
     VI. 3rd interpolation
     VII. 4th episode
 

Soundlines: A Dreaming Track (2019)
 

for percussionist-speaker and chamber ensemble with electronics

     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 for more than fifty years. In 2014 Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
     As conductor, Schick was Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Breckenridge Music Festival, and Co-Artistic Director with Claire Chase of the Banff Centre’s Summer Classical Music program. In 2020, he was awarded the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University, for his commitment to the performance of American music.  
Schick’s publications include a book, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” and numerous recordings including complete collections of the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and the early percussion works of Karlheinz Stockhausen.  His most recent project, “Weather Systems,” a multi-part retrospective of solo percussion music released on Islandia Music Records, was listed among the best recordings of 2023 by both The New York Times and The New Yorker.
     In 2019, he and his wife Brenda began The Brenda and Steven Schick Commissions to foster new creative work that embraces qualities of optimism in themes dealing with community or the environment. Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.
 

     I grew up in Edmonton, and every year my family would vacation in the Canadian Rockies. I would greatly look forward to seeing the mountains, the majesty of the giant silhouettes, the clean, crisp air, and the proximity to nature and wildlife. I was invited back to the Banff Centre last year and decided to visit the Columbia Icefields as a bit of nostalgia for my childhood. That trip pained me deeply when I saw how much the glaciers had receded since the last time I was there, about 20 years ago. “The Ice Is Talking” is a work that is an emotional reaction to that experience.
     Scored for a solo percussionist and electronics, it features the percussionist as the protagonist “playing” on a block of ice. At the start, it is a celebration of the elements, taking in the beauty of a blade gliding through ice, the taps and swishes of ice being shaped into virtuosic rhythmic patterns that speak through interjections by the performer. As the piece progresses, the piece becomes more and more violent, and the instruments reflect the rage and intensity of the protagonist, with a power drill, ice picks and stabbing motions reflecting the realization of human’s ill effects on the natural landscape. It ends with dramatic flair in the hope of raising awareness to the world around us. (Vivian Fung)
 

Vivian Fung’s The Ice is Talking, an evocative work for amplified ice and electronics, poses special challenges. Imagine the laughable sight of a percussionist hurrying three frozen blocks of ice through a southern California heatwave, hoping to reach his studio before they melt. Or imagine any group of instrumentalists, say a String Quartet rehearsing Beethoven’s Opus 131, needing to work quickly as their instruments literally disappear while they play. It seems comical.  And then you realize that the sound of the ice becomes more beautiful as it melts: the scraping is more sharply etched and the harmonic tones at the edges of the blocks purer. Vivian’s aria for ice gathers force in its final moments as heated water is poured on the blocks. 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. (Steve Schick)
 

     JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. NPR calls her “one of today’s most eclectic composers” and The Philadelphia Inquirer praises her “stunningly original compositional voice.” 
Recent and upcoming highlights include international performances of Prayer, her critically acclaimed elegy for the pandemic; the digital world premiere of two operatic scenes based on Fung’s oral family history in Cambodia with librettist Royce Vavrek; a new project about identity with Vavrek and soprano Andrea Nunez; percussion works for Network for New Music and Ensemble for These Times; and a commission from Cape Cod Chamber Music Society. 
     Born in Edmonton, Canada, Fung received her doctorate from The Juilliard School and currently lives in California. Learn more at www.vivianfung.ca.

Rain Coming is one of a series of works by the composer inspired by the common theme of rain. Entitled Waterscape, the intention was to create a series of works, which like their subject, that pass through various metamorphoses, culminating in a sea of tonality. Rain Coming is a variation of colors on the simple figure played mainly on the alto flute that appears at the beginning of the piece.

Toru Takemitsu (1931-1996) was a self-taught Japanese composer who combined elements of Eastern and Western music and philosophy to create a unique sound world. Some of his early influences were the sonorities of Debussy, and Messiaen's use of nature imagery and modal scales. There is a certain influence of Webern in Takemitsu's use of silence, and Cage in his compositional philosophy, but his overall style is uniquely his own. Takemitsu believed in music as a means of ordering or contextualizing everyday sound in order to make it meaningful or comprehensible. His philosophy of "sound as life" lay behind his incorporation of natural sounds, as well as his desire to juxtapose and reconcile opposing elements such as Orient and Occident, sound and silence, and tradition and innovation. From the beginning, Takemitsu wrote highly experimental music involving improvisation, graphic notation, unusual combinations of instruments and recorded sounds. The result is music of great beauty and originality. It is usually slowly paced and quiet, but also capable of great intensity. The variety, quantity and consistency of Takemitsu's output are remarkable considering that he never worked within any kind of conventional framework or genre. In addition to the several hundred independent works of music, he scored over ninety films and published twenty books.
Takemitsu had no important teachers, and his musical career really began with the formation of the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) to promote and perform mixed-media art works. It was Stravinsky's acclaim of the Requiem for strings in 1959 that launched Takemitsu's international career. The next few years produced a wide variety of works including Takemitsu's prolific film work, and numerous new music concerts and festivals that culminated in 1967 with a commission for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. By this time, Takemitsu had begun using traditional Japanese instruments in his music. November Steps is one of his most successful combinations of Eastern and Western music; Takemitsu's style was created from, and rooted in both. Takemitsu's international fame skyrocketed after this premiere, flooding him with commissions and honors that established him as one of the most influential Japanese composers of the century. (Steven Coburn)
 

Déserts, one of the first works in the early 1950s to combine acoustic instruments with recorded sounds, is the composer’s last completed composition and represents a breakthrough in his compositional development. The musical material heard in the ensemble is made up of sound objects - static sororities with clear identities that is not subject to change over time. The tape part assembles “organized sounds”, originally recorded on magnetic tape on an Apex tape recorder in 1953 - sounds of factories and percussion instruments. The two sound worlds never meet and are never brought together. As you listen to this work, imagine not only the physical deserts of sand, the sea with vast distances underneath the surface, or of outer space, but also the deserts in the mind of humankind, where one is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude. And yet, the hope for mankind to reach spiritual sunlight is evident in the final instrumental episode. This highly dramatic work, in touch with the deeper, repressed emotions of world society at the time it was conceived, caused protest and violent reactions in conservative concert programs (wedged between Tchaikovsky and Mozart). It is now recognized as an exceptional example of truly humanistic music. (David Gompper)
 

Edgard Varèse, (1883-1965) an American composer of French birth. Varèse has frequently been honored as the adventurous explorer of techniques and conceptions far ahead of his time. This view of his work as 'experimental' and valuable chiefly for its prophetic character has perhaps been overemphasized, but enthusiasm for the new was undeniably an important part of Varèse's personality. He produced in the 1920s a series of compositions which were innovative and influential in their rhythmic complexity, use of percussion, free atonality and forms not principally dependent on harmonic progression or thematic working. Even before World War I he saw the necessity of new means to realize his conceptions of organized sound (the term he preferred to 'music'), and, seizing on the electronic developments after World War II, he composed two of the first major works with sounds on tape. (Paul Griffiths) 

     Soundlines: A Dreaming Track is George Lewis’s musical interpretation of percussionist and composer Steven Schick’s journal documenting his 700-mile walk from the US-Mexico border to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Schick performs as speaker and percussionist, joined by a chamber ensemble featuring eight musicians and electronics.
     Reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville, and Henry David Thoreau, and the Great Migration, the Lewis’s libretto describes Schick’s inner moods, doubts, meditations, aesthetics, his personal musical practice, and social commentary, in a fashion that recalls the Australian aboriginal notion of the songline, or “dreaming track,” where repeating a song while navigating a landscape gains access to ancient stories related to the land. A surround-sound space will be created electronically, enabling text, music and field recordings related to the piece to be experienced more intensively.
 

     One day, in 2006, quite unexpectedly, I began a 700 mile walk.
     My walk from San Diego to San Francisco, begun spontaneously and without examining the consequences—which were many and profound—was a musical and personal pilgrimage. Passing among the Lotus Eaters of Southern California and through the truck farms of Santa Barbara County; skirting crowded freeways in Los Angeles and slogging up and down seemingly endless cliffs and ravines along the Big Sur Coast, my 700 mile, seven-week trek proved to me that the curtain separating music and life could be drawn aside. In fact, that curtain could be ripped to shreds.
     At 3 miles per hour, 20 miles a day, seven days a week, I had plenty of time to think. I knew, instinctively, that my pilgrimage was fundamentally a search for language, inspired by the sounds of the animate land, that could bind the disparate experiences of a musician living in the early 21st century.
     But my walk was no facile celebration of John Cage’s maxim that any sound, appropriately framed, would be music. In fact, my hunch was that Cage’s music-centric view of natural sound created an unhealthy solipsism. I didn’t want everything I heard along the way to be music, just as I didn’t want the people I met to be the supporting cast in a slow, northward-bound, one-person work of art. What I needed was not a world in which everything was music, but a righteous dose of non-music. In retrospect, my walk was a kind of mid-life crisis—a 53 year old man setting out on an inexplicable journey of self-discovery, and importantly, as you will see later, of hope.  By the time I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, high-fiving the sign announcing the border with Marin County, nearly everything important in my life had changed.
     George Lewis has told the story of my walk in his extraordinary Soundlines, a work for speaking percussionist, ensemble, and electronics, using the diary I kept along the way as the basis of a libretto. From its happy-go-lucky beginnings—I really did just start walking north one day, naively and unexpectedly—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 detailed accounts of conversations I had along the way, a list of Native American names for the places I crossed on foot, and my own, ever-present, internal monologue. George Lewis is one of the great creators of our time, whether as composer, essayist, advocate, or teacher. It is no surprise then that in Soundlines he grasped the raptures and regrets of a long walk more clearly than did the walker himself. 
     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 remember the precise moment, in a distinctly unromantic freeway underpass filled with dry brush and empty plastic bottles, when it dawned on me that I would propose to Brenda at the end of my walk. I couldn’t have survived the dehydration, the blisters, and the shin splints caused by 700 miles on foot had I been fueled only by thoughts of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, by Sappho’s poetry or Emily Thompson’s theories on the soundscape of modernity. I continued because I was walking to Brenda. 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 hopeful and sustainable 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 may wonder what Brenda’s answer was: We have been married for 16 years. (Steven Schick)
 

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University, and currently serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Lewis has been selected as a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and will be in residence at Reid Hall in Paris for Fall 2024. A 2020-21 Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin,  Lewis is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015).
     A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work is presented by ensembles worldwide. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians. Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others (https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis).