This is a pure and simple plea to get over to the currently miniscule, in internet or tertiary education terms, but nonetheless perfectly formed Ojai music festival’s Online University. The musical renaissance man, percussionist, conductor and single-handed contemporary musical phenomenon that is the American musician Steven Schick is giving free, multipart tutorials in the “art and history of percussion”. There is a fourth instalment coming on Monday, and the three that are there already are quite enough to be getting on with over the weekend. Schick – who is music director of this year’s Ojai festival, which gets going in June – shares his experiences, enthusiasms and coruscating, apparently all-encompassing musical wisdoms on the elemental truths that playing percussion can open your mind to.
That means 10 videos each on percussion – Beat of the World, The Physicality of Sound, Percussion and Story – and next week’s final instalment, Hitting Things: a Vocabulary. Each of the short sections (around 5 minutes long) takes in reflections on the elementality of all sonic phenomena to a Rowan Atkinson routine, from the music from The Matrix to Varèse’s and Cage’s innovations, from the idea of each percussion setup as a bespoke sculpture in space and time, to the Malinke tribes of Guinea and their dictum that “everything is rhythm”.
This is something you’ll agree with too, as you’re taken on Schick’s journey into the world of percussion, and a wider universe of musical connections, wonder and fundamental physical truths. All that, and if you’re in Ojai, California (and if you are, I’m jealous), check out the programme he’s put together, which runs from 10-14 June. Concerts, talks, a celebration of Pierre Boulez, performances at sunrise and sunset, a complete cycle of Bartók string quartets from the Calder Quartet, and Gerard McBurney’s and Frank Gehry’s A Pierre Dream for Pierre Boulez, a project originally made for the Chicago Symphony’s Beyond the Score initiative. Oh, and John Luther Adams’s Sila for 80 musicians, to be performed outside and creating an intervention within and enhancement of a natural landscape. And much more: so get over to Ojai, physically if you can, virtually as you should, and percussively as you must!
