Peter Schickele

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Peter Schickele (born Johann Peter Schickele, July 17, 1935) is an American composer, musical educator and parodist, perhaps best known for his comedy music albums featuring music he wrote as P. D. Q. Bach.

Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, USA, and graduated with a degree in music from Swarthmore College in 1957. He graduated from the Juilliard School with an M.S. in musical composition; in the ensuing years he has frequently cited Roy Harris as the most influential of his teachers.

Schickele has composed more than 100 original works for symphony orchestra, choral groups, chamber ensemble, voice, film (e.g. Silent Running), and television. He has also written music for school bands, folk singers (Joan Baez), and musicals, and has organized numerous concert performances as both musical director and performer. Schickele is active on the international and North American concert circuit.

Schickele's musical creations have won him multiple awards. His extensive body of work is marked by a distinctive style which integrates the European classical tradition with an unmistakable American idiom. As a musical educator he also hosted the classical music educational radio program Schickele Mix which was broadcast on many public radio stations in the United States. The Schickele Mix website [1] reports that loss of funding ended the production of new programs in 2002, but offers listings of public radio stations still carrying rebroadcasts of the programs. (Only 119 of the 169 programs were in the rebroadcast rotation, due to the fact that earlier shows contained "American Public Radio" production IDs rather than ones crediting "Public Radio International." In March 2006, however, it was announced that more of these "lost episodes" were being added back to the rotation.) A notable remnant of this program is the Periodic Table of Musics [2] that lists the names of composers and performers used against mythical element names in a table format reminiscent of the Periodic table.

Besides writing music under his own name, Schickele has developed an elaborate parodic persona built around his studies of the (fictitious) "youngest and the oddest of the twenty odd sons" of Johann Sebastian Bach, P. D. Q. Bach. His clever parodies of classical music, written under this particular Bach’s name, have earned him four Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Performance/Album. Among the huge repertory that is still being "uncovered" by the diligent Schickele are such challenging works as: The Abduction of Figaro, Canine Cantata: "Wachet Arf!" (S. K9), Good King Kong Looked Out, "Trite" Quintet (S. 6 of 1), "O Little Town of Hackensack", A Little Nightmare Music, and perhaps best known of all, the dramatic oratorio, Oedipus Tex. Though P.D.Q. Bach is ostensibly a Baroque composer, that hasn't stopped Schickele from extending his parodic repertoire to include works as modern in character as "Einstein on the Fritz," parodying his Juilliard classmate Philip Glass.

His fictitious "home establishment," where he has allegedly taken tenure as Very Full Professor Peter Schickele of both "musicolology" and "musical pathology," is the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, a little known “institution” which does not normally welcome out-of-state visitors. To illustrate the work of his uncovered composer, Schickele invented a range of rather unusual instruments. The most complicated of these is the Hardart, which consists of a variety of tone-generating devices mounted on the frame of an Automat (a coin-operated food dispenser). It is used in the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, a play on the name of proprietors Horn & Hardart, who pioneered the North American use of the Automat. Schickele also invented the dill piccolo (for playing sour notes), the left-handed sewer flute, the tromboon, the lasso d'amore and the pastaphone (an uncooked tube of manicotti pasta played as a horn). P. D. Q's 1965 Concerto for Bagpipe, Bicycle and Balloon demonstrated the inherent musical qualities of everyday objects in ways not equally agreeable to all who listen to them.

Schickele, who is also an accomplished bassoonist, was also a member of the chamber rock trio Open Window, which wrote and performed music for the revue Oh! Calcutta!. Schickele's two children, Matt and Karla, have been members of various indie rock bands, including Beekeeper, Ida, K, and the M Shanghai String Band. [3]

For the most part his music written as P. D. Q. Bach has overshadowed Schickele's work as a serious composer.

In recent years, Schickele has created non-P. D. Q. Bach albums such as Hornsmoke, Sneaky Pete and the Wolf and The Emperor's New Clothes.

Peter Schickele's music is published by the Theodore Presser Company.

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