Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past twenty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher. He studied at the University of Iowa and received the Soloists Diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau. He has commissioned and premiered more than one hundred new works for percussion and has performed these pieces on major concert series such as Lincoln Center’s ‘Great Performers’ and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ‘Green Umbrella’ concerts as well as at prestigious international festivals including Warsaw Autumn, the bbc Proms, the Jerusalem Festival, the Holland Festival, the Stockholm International Percussion Event and the Budapest Spring Festival. He has recorded many of those works for Sony Classical, Wergo, Point, crt and will release a new solo cd with Neuma Records.
From 1984 to 1992, Schick taught at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, directing a seminal percussion programme with James Wood. He has been a guest lecturer at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in London. He is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and Lecturer in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music.
Steven Schick is the percussionist of the ‘Bang on a Can All-Stars’. Other important ongoing collaborations include work with pianist James Avery and the percussion group ‘red fish blue fish’.