Cerenem Journal no. 6
jk: You played a recording of that group that included Arthur Russell. cw: Oh—Arthur was a character. And—the later the day gets the worse my name recall becomes . . . Garrett List, trombone. I mentioned Frederic. And then it would depend—David Behrman sometimes came and played, he played viola in those days . . . sort of. And I played keyboard—and actually with Frederic, who would want to play piano, I would probably play guitar. And I used to play flute, so I might play a little flute. And organ and percussion—David and I mostly went for the percussion as we couldn’t keep up with the other guys! [laughs] So that was the group. jk: Between then and now you’ve changed the way you play them, in some ways. cw: Have we changed the way we played them? jk: You have, I think. cw: Well I’d be surprised if we didn’t. jk: There are things even in the score—it seems like you’ve become more liberal, about how they can be interpreted. Like on the Ten Exercises disc, saying that there can be octave displacements. cw: Yeah—that comes straight from the players. But, I mean Larry [Polansky] was going nuts trying to—it is hard. jk: I guess if you’re used to reading it in one way . . . cw: If you’re used to it in one way and if you have a transposing instrument, it’s a real pain in the neck. I suppose someday somebody might prepare material in B-flat, as nowadays you can do that so easily once you get it into the computer. So I stretched it. But I think I mention in the note it’s also for the piccolo but that doesn’t occur on the record. She [Natacha Diels] really wanted to play her piccolo and I was like, ‘okay . . .’ [laughs] Almost everything is out of piccolo range so . . . It was an interesting recording process [for the Exercises], as you can imagine, because you just can’t do it! Which is nice in a way— mostly I really don’t like recording sessions, they’re such a drag. Play two minutes, or half a minute, stop, ‘oh let’s fix this’—it’s awful. Whereas these pieces, if you stop, you have to start again, you can’t pick it up in the middle. And you can’t edit that way either! It just has to be one take. Fortunately we had a lot of takes, and it took a while to sort it all out. And some things that we thought were really great—typically those pieces, which are so fluid, fixing them for a