Schick Machine
Rinde Eckert - Librettist/Director
Matt Heckert - Sound Sculptures
Daniel Schmidt - Invented Instruments
Performed by: Steven Schick
Schick Machine was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs and produced with the generous support of the Creative Work Fund, the Phyllis Wattis Foundation, the Argosy Fund for Contemporary Music, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bernard Osher Foundation and the Meet The Composer/Commissioning Music USA Program. The composition of the score was supported by Dresher's Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Music Composition in 2006-07.
In Schick Machine, virtuoso percussionist Steve Schick explores a magical stage filled with huge, invented instruments — including the Hurdy Grande, the Tumbler, the Peacock, the Field of Flowers, and a deconstructed pipe organ. Weaving whimsical stories about his childhood in Iowa together with unexpected encounters with noise-making objects and invented instruments, Steve lures the students into a magical world full of musical surprises, including “a dazzling electrified metal hoop that seems to want to spin and wow forever, an organ mounted like the Aztec rays of the sun, a four-foot wide spinning “cymbal” disk, and assorted woodblocks that bounce around in space”!
excerpts from Schick Machine at Premiere at Lively Arts Stanford
