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.
Steven Schick is artistic director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and the Breckenridge Music Festival. With Claire Chase, he is co-artistic director of the Summer Music Program at Banff Center in Canada.
Also active 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. In 2018 he curated and was conductor and percussion soloist in, “It’s About Time,” a festival of the San Diego Symphony designed to highlight the musical dimensions of the cross-border area.
Schick’s publications include a book, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” and numerous recordings including the 2010 “Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis,” and its companion, “The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen” in 2014 (Mode). For the latter, he received the Deutscheschallplattenkritikpreis for the best new music release of 2015. He was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 2014.
Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and holds the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.
Ivan Manzanilla - 2019 Host
Mexican percussionist, Ivan Manzanilla is a specialist in contemporary percussion music. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Mexico’s Autonomous National University and a Master and Doctoral degree from the University of California, San Diego.
Ivan Manzanilla’s work centers on the exploration and dissemination of newly created music and art. His teaching practice and commissions for new works that explore sound, language and gesture reflect his commitment to new generations of percussionists, musicians and contemporary forms of art.
His work has been recognized by different institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, the National University of Mexico, Mexico’s National Fine Arts Institute, the National Fund for Culture and Arts and the Darmstadt Summer Course.
Ivan Manzanilla is founder of Duplum together with Mexican clarinetist Fernando Dominguez and part of the SRM trio with woodwind player Peter Schmidt and guitarist Jerry Rojas. He is also a regular guest at Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, Ensemble Onix, and Liminar Ensemble.
He is the head of the Percussion Department at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico and he is a recipient of the National Fund for the Arts’ Established Artists Grant.
Aiyun Huang - 2015 Host
The ever-evolving Aiyun Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer. She was the First Prize and the Audience Award winner at the Geneva International Music Competition in 2002. Her past highlights include performances at the Victoria Hall in Geneva, Weill Recital Hall in New York, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s Green Umbrella Series, LACMA Concert Series, Holland Festival, Agora Festival in Paris, Banff Arts Festival, 7éme Biennale d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon, Vancouver New Music Festival, CBC Radio, La Jolla Summerfest, Scotia Festival, Cool Drummings, Montreal New Music Festival, Centro Nacional Di Las Artes in Mexico City, and National Concert Hall and Theater in Taipei. She is a founding member of Canadian trio Toca Loca with pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking. Since 2011, she has been performing with Musicians from soundSCAPE with soprano Tony Arnolds and pianist Thomas Rosenkranz. Her recent highlights include concerto appearances with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and L’Orchestre Suisse Romande. Aiyun has commissioned and championed over 100 works in the last two decades working with composers internationally. Upcoming collaborative projects include Tacoma Narrows Monochord with Sean Griffin and a new piece by Jaroslaw Kapuscinski with the St. Lawrence String Quartet.
She is a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology in Montreal. In 2012, Mode Records released Save Percussion Theater featuring Aiyun Huang and friends documenting important theatrical works in the percussion repertoire. Aiyun’s current research focuses on the cross-pollination between science and music from the performer’s perspective. Her ongoing project “Memory in Motion” focuses on the understanding of memory in percussion ensemble playing. In May 2013 she co-hosted Random Walks: Music of Xenakis and Beyond with Canada’s leading research institutions: Perimeter Institute, the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, and Institute for Quantum Computing. Recent recordings include Inflorescences on New Focus Recording and After JSB-RS on Naxos.
Born in Kaohsiung, a southern city of Taiwan, Aiyun holds a Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto. Her teachers included Steven Schick, Russell Hartenberger, Gaston Sylvestre, Robin Engelman, Bob Becker, and Francois Bedel. Between 2004 and 2006, she was a Faculty Fellow at UCSD. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Percussion and was recently appointed William Dawson Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She regularly teaches and performs in summer festivals including the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and soundSCAPE Festival in the Italian Alps.
Vanessa Tomlinson - 2017 Host
Australian percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson is active in the fields of solo percussion, contemporary chamber music, improvisation, installation, acoustic ecology and composition. She has performed at festivals around the world, is the recipient of 2 Green Room Awards, the 2011 APRA/AMC Award for Excellence, an Australian Council for the Arts Project Fellowship, and has been awarded artist residencies through Asialink (University of Melbourne), Civitella Ranieri (NY/Italy), Banff (Canada) and Bundanon (NSW). She has recorded on numerous labels including Mode Records, Tzadik, ABC Classics, Etcetera, Clocked Out and Innova.
Vanessa is co-founder and artistic director of Clocked Out, one of Australia’s most important and eclectic musical organizations, artistic director of percussion quartet Early Warning System, and the 2010/2016 Australian Percussion Gathering and the percussionist for The Australian Art Orchestra. She was a founding member of percussion group red fish blue fish, and is also founder and director of Ba Da Boom, the in-residence percussion ensemble at Queensland Conservatorium, and the training ground for a wide cross-section of the percussion community in Australia. She is particularly well-known for her interpretations of the music of Neal, Pateras, Griswold and Globokar, her improvisational language that incorporates sonic investigations of found objects, nature, and toy instruments, and her tireless advocacy for awareness of the plethora of high quality music-making happening in Australia.
In recent years Tomlinson has contributed greatly to the field of acoustic ecology through her work with Soundings – using performative sonic intervention to begin to understand environments. This work has been supported through the Australia Council, UNESCO and the Biosphere Soundscapes projects. Over the years Vanessa has commissioned, inspired and premiered more than 100 works, worked alongside countless wonderful improvisers, and collaborated with visual artists, dancers, and actors in a variety of settings.
Vanessa studied at the University of Adelaide, Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg and received her Masters and Doctorate from the University of California, San Diego where she worked closely with Steven Schick and George Lewis. In addition Vanessa has studied Sichuan Opera with Master Zhong Kaichi in Chengdu, China. She is currently Associate Professor in Music at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, and Deputy Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre.
