Music for percussion is more abundant than one might assume. Beyond the confines of the symphony orchestra lies a vast repertoire for percussion ensemble and for those intrepid performers who face a battery of instruments largely alone. Among these is Steven Schick, who has championed solo works for percussion throughout his career and has now embarked on a series of recordings. The series is called ‘Weather Systems’, an allusion to Schick’s upbringing on an Iowa farm, as well as a metaphor for the changing (and challenging) emotions he experienced while secluded during the pandemic.

‘A Hard Rain’ finds Schick exploring a century’s worth of percussion music – or, to be more accurate, music either featuring instruments that are struck, rubbed and shaken, or sonic ideas produced only by the human voice. The last category is represented to astonishing effect by Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonata, a ‘sonata in primordial sounds’ the German artist devised during 1922-32. The four-movement work, which runs 32 minutes in Schick’s performance, is a cavalcade of umlaut-laden gibberish (based on an opening line by Raoul Hausmann) and vocal effects that evoke many states of anxiety and whimsy. With the collaboration of interactive technology designed and performed by Shakrokh Yadegari, Schick summons as much articulate and varied wizardry with his voice that he does elsewhere with hands, fingers, whatever.

The album’s first disc is devoted to solo works that often raise the question: how does he do that? The number of instruments played in quick and subtle succession or together never seems to cause Schick a moment’s angst. He shapes John Cage’s 27'10.554" (1956) with a keen ear for the score’s 27 minutes of free-flowing nature sounds and silences. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger (1959) contains a spectrum of nuanced sonorities, while Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark (1964), in one of multiple versions Schick has made of the score, rarely speaks above a hush.

More on the apocalyptic side is Charles Wuorinen’s Janissary Music (1966), with a spectrum of confrontations coming from every direction, often to clangorous ends. Bells, gongs, cymbals, wood blocks and myriad other surfaces rub shoulders and collide in Helmut Lachenmann’s Intérieur I (1966). Similarly gleaming but in its own sound world is William Hibbard’s Parsons’ Piece (1968), which Schick plays with the finesse, clarity and atmospheric magic he brings to everything he touches.