Professional Pickelist?

(RIP Peter Schickele 2024)

One of the fun things I was invited to do while in Cleveland studying audio at Telarc records, was to be an “extra” on a Peter Schickele CD. If you look on the liner notes for “Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard”, you’ll see my name as a “pickle player”.

I had been a lifelong fan of Peter Schickele and it was a total thrill to go to Commercial Recording Studios for this recording…even if it was playing “Mary had a little lamb” on a small green plastic thing. However there were some big learnings for me that day. It became immediately evident that Peter was not particularly jovial at all.  The “comedy” he created was carefully crafted and meticulously executed. This made the recording session pretty stressful actually, but the result ended up precisely how he envisioned it.

At the end of the session, I asked Peter to sign my dill piccolo, and put together a little frame that to proudly memorialize the experience. I figured now’s a good time to post it online for everyone to see:

 

 

 

 

Here is the first page of the score that was used for the recording session, a copy of which I got to keep as a souvenir.