Post by billhammond on Jan 18, 2024 8:24:29 GMT -5
Excerpted from Washington Post
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.
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.
