Due largely to the trappings that often surround its presentation, classical music has been unfairly saddled with the stigma of being stuffy and stiff, especially to listeners who came up in the hip-shaking years of Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. But luckily there was the great composer, musical educator, and humorist Peter Schickele (1935-2024) to tear those trappings down yet keeping the sense of reverence and wonder that the music deserves fully intact—while making a whole lot of infectious fun along the way. Schickele, a longtime Bearsville resident who died in January, will be saluted with two memorial concerts, “After Spring Sunset: A Tribute to Peter Schickele” and “Elizabeth Mitchell Plays Songs of Peter Schickele,” at Maverick Concerts on August 10.
“My dad’s love of music wasn’t just something that he shared on stage or in the studio, it was part of his essence,” says Karla Schickele, the composer’s daughter. “When I was little, he would DJ for me and my brother with his enormous record collection. He’d play us all kinds of music and talk about the connections [between the styles].”
Schickele is widely remembered for being the mischievous genius behind P.D.Q. Bach, a fictional composer, said to be the youngest child of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose lost works were “discovered” by Schickele and performed across a series of bestselling musical comedy albums that begin with 1965’s Peter Schickele Presents an Evening with P. D. Q. Bach (1807–1742)?. Full of slapstick gag instrumentation and arrangements and intricately conceived, sidesplitting, dubious biographical monologues, the P.D.Q. Bach LPs poke fun at conservatory pretensions via pieces with titles like “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” “The Short-Tempered Clavier,” and “Perventimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle, and Balloons.”
Familiar to listeners as the genial host of NPR’s long-running “Schickele Mix,” Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in Washington, DC, and Fargo, North Dakota. After starting his musical career as a bassoonist—the only one in Fargo at the time, he claimed—Schickele wrote everything from chamber music to rock ‘n’ roll songs in high school and went on to earn a music degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
He next studied under Roy Harris and Darius Milhaud at Julliard, where he soon became a teacher himself, and began arranging music for Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and other folksingers and creating scores for television and film (1972’s Silent Running and a 1988 animated adaptation of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are that he narrated as well). As the P.D.Q. Bach phenomenon continued to take off, he headlined halls and appeared on popular TV programs like “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”
Frequently performing on self-invented instruments like the dill piccolo (which played only “sour” notes), the left-handed sewer flute, and the tromboon (“a cross between a trombone and a bassoon, having all the disadvantages of both”), he often saw the “serious” music that he wrote overshadowed by his P.D.Q. Bach compositions. Such is the life of a successful parodist, it would seem. But the world is certainly all the better for it.
“He was passionate about all kinds of music and so against snobbery, he never liked the term ‘serious music’,” says Karla, a musician herself who performs with Mitchell’s band Ida, and was in 1990s indie trio Beekeeper with her brother Matt Schickele. “The music he wrote was really eclectic, and the pieces we chose for the concerts really shows that.”
“Elizabeth Mitchell Plays Songs of Peter Schickele” will have the Ida singer and others performing some of Schickele’s children’s music, while “After Spring Sunset” will feature the Callisto String Quartet, the M Shanghai String Band, Hai-Ting Chinn, Michele Eaton, Wesley Chinn, Greg Purnhagen, Marc Black, and other friends and family members playing selections from Schickele’s oeuvre.
On August 10, Maverick Concerts in Woodstock will present “Elizabeth Mitchell Plays Songs of Peter Schickele” at 11 am. Admission is free. “After Spring Sunset: A Tribute to Peter Schickele” will take place at 6pm. Tickets are $27.50-$60. (General admission/lawn $25; students $10.)
This article appears in August 2024.
