Today’s concert invites you sit back, listen carefully, and enjoy some delightfully inventive, sometimes outrageous, music-and-lyrics tomfoolery!
We emphasize listening carefully, because the musical and verbal puns and references come fast and furious at times, and we’d hate to have you miss any of the fun.
Just who is P.D.Q. Bach? His dates are usually listed as 1807 to 1742 - the twenty-first of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty children - his occupation as composer and plagiarist, and summation of his life as “the last and least of J.S. Bach’s sons.”
P.D.Q. Bach is, of course, a fictional composer, concocted more than forty years ago by the multi-talented composer, musician, author, broadcaster, and satirist Peter Schickele (b. 1935). The term plagiarist might be described as a “trigger” for Schickele’s invention, for his (Schickele’s) fertile - and very well-informed, thank you - mind shows a great knowledge of, and respect for, great music and literature of the past, finding satire on it an extension of the genuine appreciation he has for what great composers and writers have given to us and our sense of culture.
The starting point for a P.D.Q. Bach/Schickele “takeoff” can be a particular musical style, or of a specific composer or one or more of that composer’s works - or from some literary work or other.
Today’s program touches on all of those. You may recall our 2006 season offering of some of Brahms’s Liebeslieder (Love Song) Waltzes, set to texts of German poets. Today we have P.D.Q. Bach’s Liebeslieder Polkas, and the three we hear have text takeoffs on Christopher Marlowe (the first one) and William Shakespeare (the other two). One of Franz Joseph Haydn’s large chorus-and-orchestra works is his oratorio The Seasons. Messrs. Bach and Schickele give us their ‘oratorio’ The Seasonings, with some ‘delicious’ texts, as you can see from the titles of its movements.
Peter Schickele ‘s credentials include study with composers Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Vincent Persichetti, and William Bergsma. He was a Juilliard School of Music student in New York, later returning to teach there in 1961. In 1965 he gave up teaching to become the freelance composer/performer he has been ever since.
Schickele wrote the musical score for the film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wilde Things Are, and has created music for four feature films, for documentaries, television commercials, and several Sesame Street segments. He was one of the composer/lyricists for Oh! Calcutta!, and has arranged music for folk singers including Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
He has written a good deal of “serious” concert music for many kinds of instrumental and vocal soloists and groups. His radio program Schickele Mix, on the air for more than fifteen years (and broadcast in the past on both WFMT and WNIB in Chicago), is an eclectic, mind-opening experience which looks at an enormously wide spectrum of music and shows how musics of all kinds relate to one another.
Schickele’s musical whimsy has reached into a number of realms beyond P.D.Q. Bach, including a clever 2½-minute piece for four bassoons titled Last Tango in Bayreuth which – within its tounge-in-cheekedness – beautifully captures the essence of the prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and flirts with music from that composer‘s Tannhäuser along the way.
