Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty 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 fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany.
He has commissioned and premiered more than one hundred new works for percussion and has performed these pieces in major concert series such as Lincoln Center's Great Performers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella concerts as well as in international festivals including Warsaw Autumn, the BBC Proms, the Jerusalem Festival, the Holland Festival, the Stockholm International Percussion Event and the Budapest Spring Festival among many others. He has recorded many of those works for SONY Classical, Wergo, Point, CRI, Neuma and Cantaloupe Records. He has been regular guest lecturer at the Rotterdam Conservatory, and the Royal College of Music in London.
Schick is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and Lecturer in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. Schick was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002. From 2000 to 2004, he served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Gen've in Geneva, Switzerland. Steven Schick is the founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, "red fish blue fish."
