THE REDEATH OF P.D.Q. BACH (1990)

Remembering Peter Schickele (1935-2024)

[This comes from More On Innovative Music(ian)s (2017), which has disappeared from Amazon.com, and perhaps from Barnes & Noble as well. (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/more-on-innovative-music-andrew-charles-morinelli/1134367962.) Try to purchase the latter from either of them. An earlier PDQB-Schickele profile appeared in my book On Innovative Music(ian)s (Limelight, 1989).]

Immature poets imitate; mature poets, steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

–T. S. Eliot, on Thomas Massinger

There is nothing wrong with stealing, as long as you know who you're stealing from.

–Peter Schickele, quoting Ralph Vaughn Williams

Last summer buzzed in my ear the rumor that P.D.Q. Bach might die again, that his dates in the history books would read not only 1807-1742?, as it now stands, but also 1965-1991. The rumor continued that his terminal concert would be 1 April 1991, which is P.D.Q.'s birthday. "It's all false," his creator-alter ego Peter Schickele told me. P.D.Q. was simply going to follow the late Glenn Gould's example and retire from live concertizing, sort of.

   One afternoon last fall, seated in a windowless midtown Manhattan office, the ebullient Schickele explained that after a thousand or so live concerts all over North America (never abroad) he would like to fill touring time with other activities, done not only under his own name but as P.D.Q. His plans include a regular radio program with "Peter Schickele" as an inspired commentator, more "P.D.Q.B." discs from Telarc, and more composing as "P.S.," especially for movies, for the theater, and for children. As P.S., he has even produced a pilot of a television program for children. Unlike Gould who vowed to give up live concertizing forever and kept his promise, Schickele speaks of "a hibernation, a going underground, an indefinite sabbatical, without any commitment to going back."

   Myself I don't believe it. I knew Gould, who despised live performing; he hated appearing in public; he refused to shake hands; he preferred to communicate with friends by telephone. Peter Schickele is not like that at all. The theatrical stage has always been his most natural habitat; the live audience, an easy friend. "I'm not afraid of kissing people on the cheek," he told me. As long as people want to see P.D.Q. Bach, and they do, he will feel tempted to return; and being a far more agreeable person than Gould ever was, I'll wager thaler to groschen that Schickele will tour P. D. Q. Bach again.

   It has been a really extraordinary creation, this P.D.Q. Bach: a fictional composer of pseudo-classical music that could be quite funny. It is true that the humor depended upon such marvelously comic titles as Concerto for Horn and Hardart and Iphigenia in Brooklyn back in 1965, the "Safe" Sextette more recently. It also depended upon invented instruments or unusual combinations that made unusual sounds. The hardart, for instance, was a collection of dime-store noise-makers each tuned to a different pitch. The sextette depends, as he told me, "upon the forgotten members of the orchestra: piccolo, English horn, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, harp, and celeste." Its title comes "from the fact that it was discovered in a safe." Notwithstanding the titles and the instrumentation, the music itself could be witty in its shifts between high art and pop, between fast and slow, between classical and contemporary. Indeed, there is no doubt that much of the greatest comic classical music in all history is attributed to P.D.Q. Bach.

  Born in 1935 in Ames, Iowa, Schickele grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, the son of an agricultural economist (himself the son of the noted Alsatian expressionist poet Rene Schickele, 1883-1940). Peter and his younger brother David built a basement theater, produced radio comedies, taped their musical performances, and shot films (with David eventually becoming a professional filmmaker).

   Peter also played the bassoon in the local semi-pro symphony and appeared in local theater productions. He discovered the records of Spike Jones, the comedic bandleader, whom he considers to this day the principal influence on P.D.Q.'s musical art. It was back there in Fargo, which is culturally about as far from eastern Germany as you can get in the western world, that the moniker "P.D.Q. Bach" was born, his initials referring to an obsolete euphemism for "pretty damn quick."

  After he left Fargo, Schickele's theatrical career got sidetracked. He went to Swarthmore–then as now, as challenging a college as America allows. He studied composing as often as possible, even spending a summer at Aspen with Roy Harris. Graduating as the only music major in the 1957 class, he came to Juilliard, which was then considered to offer the best professional training for the budding composer. Among his Juilliard classmates were Philip Glass and Steve Reich, two young men who have since become well-known avant-garde composers.

  Schickele is best remembered as the most adept student in the class–the one who would finish the assignments with the quickest dispatch. "If we were asked to write a symphonic movement in the manner of Stravinsky," Glass once told me, "Peter could do it over a weekend. He could write synthetic Copland, synthetic Mozart, synthetic Bach. He had no fear of the terrors of composition." For his final year, Schickele was invited to teach an advanced class, and to this day Glass attests that his best course at Juilliard was "Peter's, in ear training."

  As Schickele recalls, it was in the Juilliard cafeteria that the young composers discussed all the hilarious accidents they had seen in classical concerts. Why not do a concert full of them, he thought. The first opportunity came in the spring of 1959, when Schickele was invited to fill half a concert program on short notice. To the fore came his legendary facility. The conductor for this ruse was Jorge Meister, who later conducted the orchestra on P.D.Q. Bach's first records and who, as the music director of the Pasadena Symphony, will conduct the terminal concert on April first. (Loyalty to his colleagues remains a Schickele virtue.)

   In the early 1960s, young Schickele pursued a compositional career, spending a year in Los Angeles and teaching at both of his alma maters. In 1962 he married the poet Susan Sindall; their family now includes two adult children.