Composer and parodist Peter Schickele has died.
Schickele was best known for his “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, whom he slyly promoted as the last and least of Johann Sebastian Bach’s progeny – “the 21st of Bach’s 20 children.” P.D.Q.’s manuscripts invariably turned up in the most undignified of places (leaky-ceilinged castles, the bottoms of bird cages, and as coffee maker filters). The music was introduced in performance and on record by “Professor” Peter Schickele, an equally amusing, unreliable source. The combination entertained for more than 50 years, a veritable automat of freewheeling parody, excruciating puns, and good old-fashioned, pie-in-the-face slapstick.
Some of the gags flirted with tedium, but there was always a diamond or two in the rough. If nothing else, you could always count on Schickele’s Jekyll-and-Hyde act to skewer the solemn conventions of classical music.
Frustratingly, his comic success undermined Schickele the “serious” composer. He studied with two of America’s most respected symphonists, Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. Under his own name, he produced over 100 works. These could be wildly pluralistic in nature, drawing on folk, jazz, blues, or rock influences. A number of his contemporaries pursued similar impulses (William Bolcom, for one, and it didn’t keep him from winning a Pulitzer), but Schickele never escaped the long shadow of low humor. Which is a shame, as his music is ceaselessly vital, conveying exuberance, invention, and a kind of genial wit.
Schickele also wrote scores for film (“Silent Running”) and songs for Broadway (“O Calcutta!”). For 15 years, he hosted his own syndicated radio show, “Schickele Mix.”
I interviewed him once and met him at a concert at the College of New Jersey in 2014. By that time, he was no longer swinging onto stage by a rope, as he did at Carnegie Hall. Instead, his comic creations were executed by others as he oversaw the shenanigans like something of a dignified lion – albeit a wry lion – providing commentary by way of brief and informal exchanges with Wayne Heisler, TCNJ Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music.
P.D.Q. was classical music’s most prolific dad joke, perpetrating groaners like “No-No Nonette,” “Unbegun Symphony,” and “Pervertimento for Bagpipe, Bicycle and Balloons.”
An obituary in the New York Times encapsulates it very well: “In creating P.D.Q.’s oeuvre and putting it onstage, Mr. Schickele cannily deconstructed the classical music of Mozart’s time and just as cannily reassembled it in precisely the wrong configuration.”
It was humor that could engage on two levels, appealing to anyone who ever laughed at someone slipping on banana peel, but also to those who understood the enormity of his musical crimes.
He was rewarded with five Grammy Awards (one for him, and four for P.D.Q.) and by audiences full of chortling fans for over five decades.
Schickele died on Tuesday at the age of 88 – coincidentally the number of keys on a short-tempered clavier.
R.I.P.
On “The Tonight Show”
With Itzhak Perlman and John Williams
Part 1
Part 2
In better definition, and still entering on a rope in Houston in his 70s
Playing it straight: Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano
String Quartet No. 1 “American Dreams,” etc.
Joan Baez sings Schickele in “Silent Running”
The composer interviewed by Bruce Duffie
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