[Saul] Steinberg's role automatically disguises itself, and
his performance continues to prompt people to ask, "But is
he really an artist?"--the question by which each
legitimate avant-garde has been greeted.
--Harold Rosenberg,
Art on the Edge
P.D.Q. Bach has been such a successful innovation that he has all but obscured the existence of his creator, a composer named Peter Schickele, who scarcely resembles his alter ego. Whereas P.D.Q. is portrayed as a sot, Schickele himself is virtually abstemious; whereas P.D.Q. is self-defeating, Schickele has been industrious; whereas P.D.Q. was reportedly too incompetent to receive music lessons, Schickele has had an elaborate education, not only in music but in the liberal arts as well. If the pseudo-historic Bach was a jerk, his creator is anything but. Whereas P.D.Q. was born in Germany, "the 21st of Bach's 20 children," Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, July 17, 1935, the son of a German-born professor of agricultural economics. Whereas P.D.Q. is famous, Schickele himself is not--were P.D.Q. to board a New York City subway, people would stop and stare, while Schicke himself rides it, undisturbed, all the time.
Nonetheless, P.D.Q. Bach is a unique figure in the history of classical music, a pseudo-eighteenth century composer whose works were "discovered" in the twentieth. Under his name have appeared more than seventy-five individual pieces, for various instrumentation, all of them comic, some of them quite classic. The records issued under his name over the past quarter century are all in print; so is The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach (1976). Every year there are dozens of concerts of his works across the United States. His pieces can be heard again and again, not only because the gags are good enough to stand rehearing, but because the music as music is mellifluous as well. Looking back, I think there is every reason to regard P.D.Q. Bach as the most successful comic composer in the history of classical music.
The father of peter Schickele had come to Ames, Iowa, in 1933, on an academic scholarship from the German government. The son of Rene Schickele (1883-1940), a peripatetic Alsatian Poet, Rainer Schickele soon met Elizabeth Wilcox and married her the following year. Peter came a year later; his brother David two years after that. In 1947, the family moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where the brothers built a basement theater. They also emulated radio comedies and taped their musical performances. It was here that the moniker "P.D.Q. Bach" was born, his initials referring to an obsolete euphemism for "pretty damn quick."
A whiz at school as well as the bassoonist in the local symphony and a performer in local theater productions, young Peter graduated from public high school and then went to Swarthmore, as tough a college as America knows. Graduating as the only music major in the 1957 class (just two years behind Michael Dukakis), Schickele came to Julliard, which was then thought to offer the best professional training for a budding composer. Among his Julliard classmates were Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, two men who have since become well-known composers.
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