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 for more than fifty years. In 2014 Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame. Schick’s publications include a book,“The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, and numerous recordings including the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Weather Systems, a multi-part retrospective recording of solo percussion music, 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. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.