Don't Look Bach

by Gary Kenton and photographs by Fionn Reilly, May 06, 2009

Peter Schickele at the keyboard composing music in his Bearsville home.

With his shaggy, salt-and-pepper beard and work boots, Peter Schickele fits unobtrusively into his adopted home of Woodstock, but do not be fooled by his unimposing exterior. This is a man of multiple identities with a subversive plan to hijack - or at least expand - American musical tastes.

There is Peter Schickele, the composer of symphonic, chamber, and choral music, with commissions from the National Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among others. Then there is the author of music for film, theater, and TV, known among sci-fi buffs for his score for the film Silent Running, among ex-hippies for his songs for "Oh! Calcutta!," and among children of all ages for his soundtrack for the film version of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Occasionally, he shows up in the guise of cabaret singer ("in the pop-folk tradition of Randy Newman and Paul Simon," he says) or as collaborator in a program of semi-autobiographical art songs with his wife, the poet Susan Sindall.

But the rarely mild-mannered Schickele is probably best known as the creator of PDQ Bach, the hapless and wholly fictitious child of Johann Sebastian Bach. The works of this deservedly unheralded Bach include "The Short-Tempered Clavier," "Concerto for Horn & Hardart," and "Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice," and feature such non-traditional instruments as the windbreaker, comprised of mailing tubes, and a bicycle with a siren and baseball cards mounted on the wheels. It is the alter ego of the "manic plagiarist" PDQ Bach that provides Schickele with his bounciest performance springboard from which to show off his erudition while simultaneously exposing the clichés and pomposities of the classical canon. Familiarity with Bach might enhance one's appreciation of the parody, but it is hardly necessary. The works of PDQ Bach owe a greater debt to (Spike) Jones than to Johann (Sebastian).

Most accessible of these personae is Professor Schickele, the scholarly and utterly shameless host of a weekly syndicated radio program, "Schickele Mix" (heard locally at 11am on Saturdays on WAMC-FM). On the air, Schickele explores the intricacies of the fugue one moment and plays "The Fugs" the next. He punctuates discussions of harpsichords with histrionics worthy of Harpo Marx. His digressions are often just as entertaining as the intended theme, but an "irrelevancy alarm" sounds if he strays too far.