published on August 19, 2024 in Celeb Gist

Peter Schickele, musical parodist behind P.D.Q. Bach, dies at 88

Peter Schickele, a Grammy Award-winning composer and wry humorist who presented himself as the world’s leading authority on the rule-fracturing P.D.Q. Bach, the “last and least” of J.S. Bach’s musical children, died Jan. 16 at his home in Bearsville, N.Y. He was 88.

His daughter, Karla Schickele, confirmed the death and said his health had been in decline after infections last fall.

In a career spanning more than five decades, the Juilliard-trained Mr. Schickele generated agreeably melodic chamber music, vocal works, symphonic scores and film soundtracks. But he drew his greatest acclaim as a comedic maestro who created, performed, wrote about and lectured on the pseudo-classical and baroque music of the fictional P.D.Q. Bach.

A stocky, bearded man with omnivorous musical tastes and a quick sense of humor, Mr. Schickele looked slightly like Brahms in profile — a similarity he sometimes exploited in his P.D.Q. Bach programs by turning to the side and mimicking a pose from a well-known Brahms portrait.

The rarefied reference was typical of Mr. Schickele’s comedy. Jokes meant for experts on composition were intertwined with gags that required only a cursory knowledge of music — the interruption of a serene baroque adagio with a few bars of boogie-woogie, for example, or an overlay of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a J.S. Bach prelude.

The works of P.D.Q. Bach often parodied the titles of popular classics. Among them were “The Seasonings” (after Haydn’s “The Seasons”), the “Sanka Cantata” (after J.S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”), “Oedipus Tex” (after the Sophocles fable, but set in the Wild West, with Billie Jo Casta and Madame Peep among the characters) and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (a conflation of the Humperdinck opera and filmmaker Paul Mazursky’s satire about swingers).

P.D.Q. Bach’s instrumentation offered twists of its own. Although pieces such as the “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons” used commonplace objects not typically heard in an orchestral context, others required Mr. Schickele to build instruments of his own.

When he conceived the early “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” for example, he knew the title — which alludes to a then-popular (but now defunct) chain of self-service restaurants — would only work if there were a “hardart” to play alongside the horn. So he made a nine-foot gizmo loaded with cartoonish wind instruments (kazoos and ocarinas), zany percussion (buzzers, bells and mixing bowls, as well as exploding balloons), a set of automat-style coin-operated windows and a coffee spigot.

For his P.D.Q. Bach shows, Mr. Schickele adopted an alter ego, Professor Peter Schickele, head of the Department of Musical Pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Typically, he arrived late and with maximum commotion, his shirt untucked, his tuxedo in disarray, and wearing work boots. Until the early 1980s, his entrances often involved swinging to the stage from the balcony on a rope, knocking over as many music stands and chairs as possible; in later years, he would run down an aisle and belly flop onto the stage, or be lowered in a basket.

The shows were deadpan parodies of musicological lectures, introducing newly “discovered” works by the fictional P.D.Q. Bach with a blend of faux-history and jokes poking fun at contemporary musicians. Once, he included in a program book an airsickness bag, labeled “For Use In Case of Cultural Discomfort.”

Mr. Schickele’s P.D.Q. Bach repertory fills more than a dozen albums, recorded between 1965 and 2007, and is discussed in the book “The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach” (1976). Four of his recordings — “1712 Overture & Other Musical Assaults” (1989), “Oedipus Tex and Other Choral Calamities” (1990), “Classical WTWP Talkity-Talk Radio” (1991) and “Music for an Awful Lot of Winds & Percussion” (1992) — won the Grammy Award for best comedy album. (His 1998 album “Hornsmoke: Music of Peter Schickele,” received a Grammy for best classical crossover album.)

Mr. Schickele trafficked in humor under his own name, at times. In his “Songs From Shakespeare” (1954), he transformed soliloquies from “Macbeth,” “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” into blues tunes and country songs. He also wrote new texts for Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” (retitling it “Sneaky Pete and the Wolf”) and Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals” (both in 1992).

“New Horizons in Music Appreciation” (1967) is a version of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with a script in which Mr. Schickele and a color commentator narrate the work as if it were a sports event (along the way providing an interesting analysis of the piece).

Most of his serious concert music was amiable and tuneful, based on themes with an appealing folk-like innocence. He sometimes embraced overtly painterly elements, as in his “Music for Orcas Island” (2007), a piano quartet in which briskly morphing harmonies evoke billowing clouds, and pizzicato effects suggest rain.

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His catalogue of more than 100 works includes film scores for the sci-fi drama “Silent Running” (1972), five string quartets, concertos for bassoon, clarinet, oboe, French horn, piano and cello, and two symphonies as well as many vocal and choral works and pieces for varied chamber combinations.

“There are a lot of people who are not only surprised I write serious music, but also disappointed, like ‘Here’s another clown who wants to play Hamlet,’” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “It would be ungrateful to be too resentful. I always like doing P.D.Q. Bach, and I’ve been making a very nice living doing something I love doing. I’ve made my bed, and it’s not a bad bed.”

Johann Peter Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, on July 17, 1935. His father was a Berlin-born agricultural economist, and his mother was a biothermologist who, during World War II, was on the team that developed the concept of wind chill.

The family settled in Fargo, N.D., after the war, and Mr. Schickele began studying composition with Sigvald Thompson, a respected orchestral leader in the state. He also studied the bassoon and piano and, although he dreamed of becoming an actor rather than a musician, his taste for musical satire had already been awakened.

“I remember being in a record store and hearing a very soupy, sentimental ballad,” Mr. Schickele told the New York Times in 1977. “Being a 10-year-old, I thought there was nothing worse than soupy, sentimental ballads, but all of a sudden there was a gunshot, and the music took off into a Dixieland kind of thing. It was my introduction to Spike Jones, and I completely fell over myself for his records.”

With his younger brother David (who became a filmmaker and died in 1999), Mr. Schickele began writing musical parodies and recording them on an open-reel deck. He received a bachelor’s degree in music from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1957 and completed a master’s degree in 1960 at the Juilliard School in Manhattan in addition to studying privately with composers Darius Milhaud and Roy Harris.

Returning to teach at Juilliard in the early 1960s, he teamed up with conductor Jorge Mester to present concerts of musical parodies, inspired by the growth of interest in baroque music and the attendant revival not only of Bach, but also of many lesser-known composers.

The concerts became an annual tradition at Juilliard until 1965, when Mr. Schickele left the faculty and soon took P.D.Q. Bach to such Manhattan performance spaces as Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Mr. Schickele stopped touring with P.D.Q. Bach in 1991, although he continued making appearances with orchestras.

In 1962, he married Susan Sindall, a poet who was studying dance at Juilliard. In addition to his wife and daughter, survivors include a son, Matthew, and two grandsons.

The success of P.D.Q. Bach gave Mr. Schickele the freedom to pursue other aspects of his composing and performing career. In 1967, he started the Open Window, a chamber-rock-jazz trio also featuring composers Robert Dennis and Stanley Walden. Mr. Schickele contributed music to Kenneth Tynan’s bawdy and long-running Broadway show “Oh! Calcutta!” and supplied arrangements and orchestrations for recordings by Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie and other folk singers.

Mr. Schickele hosted the radio show “Schickele Mix” for Public Radio International. In 168 episodes, produced between 1992 and 1999, he explored the elements, concepts and techniques that make music work, illustrated with classical, jazz and rock recordings, proclaiming in his introductions that “all musics are created equal.”

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