Peter Schickele (1935–2024)

There seems to have been a kind of golden age of classical-music-based humour in the 1950s and 60s, with musically-literate audiences of our (grand-)parents’ generation filling concert halls to titter at the antics of people like Gerard Hoffnung and Victor Borge. Peter Schickele’s concerts of the music of PDQ Bach, which started out as a student prank at the Juilliard and went mainstream in New York in the mid-1960s, fitted squarely into this tradition.

Schickele managed to keep the joke show more going for longer than most, and eventually the fiction of J.S. Bach’s youngest son, the only completely untalented member of the dynasty, expanded from a silly name and a couple of parody pieces to a complete life-story, whilst Schickele built up a matching comic persona for himself as Very Full Professor of Musicolology and Musical Pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople tracing fragments of PDQ’s music in the bottom of chamber pots and on the rubbish heaps of Central European inns.

In this biography, Schickele pokes fun at the conventions of musical literature in multiple ways, speculating at length about PDQ’s life-story for which, even in fiction, only the flimsiest bits of evidence survive. We know that he was apprenticed to a deranged carpenter and instrument maker, Zahnstocher (=Toothpick), that he was for a time Kapellmeister in the inebriated court of Prince Fred at Wein-am-Rhein, and that he ended up in the spa town of Baden Baden Baden after making a fortune from a travelling medicine show, but beyond that it is all speculation. And Schickele doesn’t hesitate to speculate.

The book is lavishly illustrated with crazy musical examples and wittily miscaptioned period engravings, and — as you would expect — the text is one long succession of bad jokes, perhaps the most flagrant of them being the passage where he embarks on a serious discussion of an abstruse bit of musical philosophy but the text runs off the bottom of the page into oblivion before he can get to the point.

At one point Schickele writes about his own research methods, illustrating his account with a photo-essay about the facilities of the USND at H (this location seems to be a dig at the agricultural college where his father used to teach). Each photo purporting to be a different faculty building actually shows the same isolated barn from a different angle.

The book ends with various useless appendices and a catalogue raisonné of PDQ Bach’s surviving works, including such old favourites as the Pervertimento and the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn”.

Fun if you’re musically-minded and have a taste for slightly puerile humour! show less

Peter Schickele died last week. I’ve seen him in person and was totally entertained. Since his death, I’ve watched some of his videos and read his book THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF PDQ BACH for the first time. My only complaint is that I wish I knew more about music.
The book is delightful and full of laughs that sneak up on you. For example, names of people and places and footnotes (do read them all). My husband, who is a musician, is sitting near me reading the book, cracking up at many show more of these passages. He’ll explain them to me when he finishes.
Some serious information explaining some of information does creep in but it is often an offshoot cloaked in humor such as defining terms like “What do you mean by form?”
Other examples of humor are found in chapter titles: Chapter 1 Early Infancy. 1742 to 1745. Chapter 2. Late Infancy 1745 to 1766.
“A man who triumphed over the most staggering obstacle ever place before a composer:: absolute and utter lack of talent.”
One sentence has 102 words and 27 commas.
There are descriptions and drawings of esoteric instruments as well as stories of his operas and compositions.
Schickele goes into detail analyzing the music. The more you know about the music, the funnier it will be.
At one point the author was trying to locate a person to get more information about P. D. Q. Bach. but the man was no longer at the monastery. “He had been exposed as a thief, and sent away with brand on his forehead signifying to all the world that he was a felonious monk.”
Unfortunately, I read an e-book version and the photography was blurry.
If you’re not familiar with PDQ Bach, go online and look at some of the videos. Here’s one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WR4CdKSeD-E show less

From the table of contents to the index, this book is absolutely hilarious. P.D.Q. Bach is the worst composer in the history of music (or would be if he hadn't been made up by Peter Schickele). In this book Schickele summarizes the scholarship available thus far on the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son, P.D.Q. (apparently Bach was so unimpressed with his youngest child that he didn't even bother to give him a name, just initials that may or may not stand for anything). show more P.D.Q.'s legacy of "originality through incompentency" is obvious in the unconventional instruments he wrote for including bicycle, balloon, tromboon (a trombone with a bassoon's mouthpiece), pandemonium, steam calliope, kazoo, and oscar mayer weiner whistle, among many others. From his beginnings as a composer (The Initial Plunge period), to midlife when he found his niche (The Soused Period), to his later years (The Contrition Period), P.D.Q.'s music is so bad it's sure to make anyone laugh. Schickele was also able to blackmail a recording studio into producing albums of P.D.Q.'s discovered works, which I highly recommend to anyone who is willing to listen. This was a great book. show less

I have long enjoyed and found hilarious the Peter Schickele hoax/farce of P.D.Q. Bach. I first was introduced through the now defunct Detroit classical music FM station WQRS. After collecting records, I now have enjoyed this detailed and encompassing book-length treatment of the joke. I think it hits my funnybone the same way Monty Python does for being irreverent and smartly funny and I see in reading these old chestnuts that some of this stuff has crept into my own repertoire and become show more part of my own sense of humor... show less