The classical composer who invented P.D.Q. Bach
Peter Schickele 1935–2024
Peter Schickele created a musical monster: P.D.Q. Bach, whom he described as the “last and least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children. Schickele would stride onstage, introducing himself as a “musical pathology” scholar at the “University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople” and waving sheet music by the fictional P.D.Q. Bach that he said he’d just found in the trash. The orchestra would then start playing classical music with a comic twist—a selection from the cowboyesque opera Oedipus Tex, perhaps, or a stand-alone piece such as “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle, and Balloons”—while the audience roared with laughter. P.D.Q. Bach earned Schickele four of his five Grammy Awards, for Best Comedy Album—not bad for an ostensible 18th-century ne’er-do-well his creator called “history’s most justifiably neglected composer.”
Schickele was born into a family of scientists, with an economist father and a biothermologist mother, but he was musical from the beginning. In high school in Fargo, N.D., he played bassoon with a local symphony. Listening to Spike Jones records awakened his “taste for musical satire,” said The Washington Post, and he and his brother made up the P.D.Q. Bach character. After studying and then teaching at Juilliard, Schickele resurrected the gag for a 1965 concert that included a piece called “Concerto for Horn and Hardart.” Named after a then-popular automat chain, it featured an instrument he built with Philip Glass that included bells, whistles, and sliding glass doors. Other concerts featured oddball contraptions such as the “tromboon” and the “left-handed sewer flute.” Schickele’s “ingeniously orchestrated hoaxes” contained multiple layers of humor, said The Telegraph (U.K.). General audiences laughed at the obvious wrong notes and silly sounds, while musicology buffs appreciated the compositional japes that let Schickele show off his knowledge of classical idioms.
Schickele’s “antic alter ego” often upstaged his more serious persona, said The New York Times. His compositions also included chamber pieces, film scores, Broadway showtunes, and folk songs, and a few concertgoers “expecting belly laughs” left his straight shows disappointed. But Schickele was grateful for the figure he’d unleashed on the classical music world. “I’m amazed that P.D.Q. has gone on for 50 years,” he said in 2015. “It just goes to show, some people never learn.”