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Conductors

Steven Schick, Music Director

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 für Musik in Freiburg, Germany. Steven Schick 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 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 Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Steven Schick is the founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, "red fish blue fish."

In 2006, Schick released three important publications. His book on solo percussion music, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, was published by the University of Rochester Press; his recording of "The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies by John Luther Adams was released by Cantaloupe Music; and a 3-CD set in collaboration with the percussion group, "red fish blue fish," of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis was released by Mode Records.

Steven Schick, Percussionist

"Steven Schick is a wizard, a master, a roshi of percussion. Schick turns percussion into a benign and exquisitely elegant form of martial art. The intensity and commitment are palpable, breathtaking."

The Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia)

"Schick has an actor's concentration and a dancer's physical control. He makes no motion without motivation, describes the music with his body, and yet does not distract from the aural experience."

The Los Angeles Times

"Steven Schick took an austere piece, Iannis Xenakis' Psappha, and turned it into a one-man explosion. With the score in his head, he danced inside a framework of wood, metal and membranes, hitting everything almost at once in frenetic, but elegant choreography."

The Village Voice

"Steven Schick is an exception among percussionists. A man electrified on the passing of time, sunk in concentration, to be awakened as an instrument himself, measuring, with his sticks, a kind of cosmic time."

Badische Zeitung (Freiburg)

David Chase, Choral Director

Now in my third decade of working with the La Jolla Symphony Chorus, I have stronger feelings than ever about its future as a cultural symbol as well as a vehicle for great music. If, in the future, music is to remain the province of the community and of the individuals in the community, rather than a product that is packaged and sold to consumers, community choruses like the La Jolla Symphony Chorus will be an important force. In order for that force to be strong and positive, we must not only maintain the strengths of the choral tradition — its egalitarian access to art music, its communal bonding, its direct relationship to both traditions and trends in literary arts — but we must also develop new repertoire and a new audience. I see the LJSC as an exemplary vehicle for these developments.

Above all, the Chorus must continue to grow musically. To do this, we will continue to use professional musicians to train and inspire the non-professionals who will always be the heart of our ensemble. And we will challenge those singers with repertoire, both new and traditional, that they will not experience elsewhere in our area. Because this is a community organization, all development within the ensemble is also an investment in the community's vision and understanding of the art. Our programming and performance techniques will continue to seek new ways to engage our audiences. Unlike the choirs that are appended to religious or patriotic organizations, our repertoire and performance style are not circumscribed by a function within a larger community tradition and should not be limited in that way. We, therefore, will continue to experiment with programming and presentation, seeking to reinvigorate the choral art. This will include the commissioning of new works to extend the repertory, the formation of new chamber vocal ensembles to provide flexibility and variety in programming, and experimenting with aspects of theatricality in order to more actively engage the audience in the performance.

The ultimate goal of these concerns is to make our choral music relevant and exciting to a broader, more secular and diverse community, while consciously and conscientiously extending what has been an important cultural tradition for more than five hundred years.

Thomas Nee, Music Director Emeritus

Thomas Nee became music director of the La Jolla Symphony in 1967 when the La Jolla Civic Orchestra joined forces with the new music department at UCSD, and led the orchestra for the next 31 seasons. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna where he was a Fulbright Scholar. Nee served as conductor of the Civic Orchestra of Minneapolis (1953-1967), music director of the Minnesota Opera in 1963-67 and music director of the New Hampshire Music Festival (1960-1992).

Nee transformed the La Jolla Symphony from a small community ensemble into a semi-professional orchestra of a hundred players. Nee also expanded its repertory, championing new music and teaching the orchestra members to be flexible and open to new musical experiences. He led the orchestra in several commercial recordings and invited composers Ernst Krenek, Henry Brant, and Bernard Rands to guest-conduct. Upon Nee's retirement, the La Jolla Symphony established an annual commissioning program named "The Thomas Nee Commission."

Nee's years with the orchestra were exciting--he inspired respect, love, and fierce loyalty from his players. Still active as a guest conductor, Nee is leading the orchestra with Respighi's Trittico Botticelliano in the December concert of its fiftieth anniversary season.