P. D. Q. Bach is a fictitious composer invented by
musical satirist "Professor" Peter Schickele. In a gag that Schickele
has developed over a five-decade-long career, he performs
"discovered" works of the "only forgotten son" of the Bach
family. Schickele's music combines parodies
of musicological scholarship, the conventions of Baroque and classical music,
and some slapstick comedy.
The name "P. D. Q." is a parody of the three-part names given to some members of the Bach family that are commonly reduced to initials, such as C. P. E., for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. PDQ is an initialism for "pretty damn quick".
Schickele gives a humorous fictional biography of the composer with citations such as the following:
In preconcert lectures, Schickele joked that P. D. Q. Bach influenced Beethoven's famous deafness: Beethoven came to dread P. D. Q. Bach and his music so greatly that Beethoven resorted to stuffing coffee grounds into his ears whenever he saw P. D. Q. Bach coming.
In a running gag in Concerto for Horn and Hardart and in the introduction to Six Contrary Dances on his Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion album, Schickele inferred from fictional evidence that P. D. Q. Bach had a hollow leg that was considerably longer than the other one which explains the odd patterns in his dance music.
Schickele describes P. D. Q. Bach as having "the originality of Johann Christian, the arrogance of Carl Philipp Emanuel, and the obscurity of Johann Christoph Friedrich". The most distinguishing feature of P. D. Q. Bach's music, in the words of Schickele, is "manic plagiarism".
Schickele's works, attributed to P. D. Q. Bach, often incorporate comical rearrangements of well-known works of other composers. The works use instruments not normally used in orchestras, such as the bagpipes, slide whistle, kazoo, and fictional or experimental instruments such as the pastaphone (made of uncooked manicotti), tromboon, hardart, lasso d’amore, and left-handed sewer flute. The works also incorporate items not normally used as musical instruments, such as balloons, fog horns, and bicycles. His music also calls for unusual methods of playing traditional instruments, such as blowing through double reeds by themselves (that is, detached from the instruments) throughout Iphigenia in Brooklyn. His parts for vocalists include coughing, snoring, sobbing, laughing, and yelling.
P. D. Q. Bach's work pokes fun at musical genres including Baroque, Romantic, modern, country music (Oedipus Tex and Blaues Gras), and rap (Classical Rap). The "Schickele" or "S." numbers whimsically assigned to P. D. Q. Bach's works parody musicologists' catalogues of famous composers, such as the Kochel catalogue of Mozart’s works.
There is often a startling juxtaposition of styles within a single P. D. Q. Bach piece. The Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz, which alludes to Philip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach, provides an example. The underlying music is J.S. Bach’s first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, but at double the normal speed, with each phrase repeated interminably in a minimalist manner that parodies Glass's. On top of this mind-numbing structure is added everything from jazz phrases to snoring to heavily-harmonized versions of Three Blind Mice to the chanting of a meaningless phrase ("Koy Hotsy-Totsy," alluding to the art film Koyaanisqatsi for which Glass wrote the score). Through all these mutilations, the piece never deviates from Bach's original harmonic structure.
The humor in P. D. Q. Bach music often derives from violation of audience expectations, such as repeating a tune more than the usual number of times, resolving a musical chord later than usual or not at all, unusual key changes, excessive dissonance, or sudden switches from high art to low art. Further humor is obtained by replacing parts of certain classical pieces with similar common songs, such as the opening of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 with “Beautiful Dreamer”, or the opening of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with Yankee Doodle.
The name "P. D. Q." is a parody of the three-part names given to some members of the Bach family that are commonly reduced to initials, such as C. P. E., for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. PDQ is an initialism for "pretty damn quick".
Biography]
Schickele gives a humorous fictional biography of the composer with citations such as the following:
- P. D. Q. Bach was born in
- P.D.Q. attributed his frequent headaches to
his having been christened in a shipyard rather than a church.
- Defined the doctrine of Originality Through
Incompetence.
In preconcert lectures, Schickele joked that P. D. Q. Bach influenced Beethoven's famous deafness: Beethoven came to dread P. D. Q. Bach and his music so greatly that Beethoven resorted to stuffing coffee grounds into his ears whenever he saw P. D. Q. Bach coming.
In a running gag in Concerto for Horn and Hardart and in the introduction to Six Contrary Dances on his Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion album, Schickele inferred from fictional evidence that P. D. Q. Bach had a hollow leg that was considerably longer than the other one which explains the odd patterns in his dance music.
Music
Schickele describes P. D. Q. Bach as having "the originality of Johann Christian, the arrogance of Carl Philipp Emanuel, and the obscurity of Johann Christoph Friedrich". The most distinguishing feature of P. D. Q. Bach's music, in the words of Schickele, is "manic plagiarism".
Schickele's works, attributed to P. D. Q. Bach, often incorporate comical rearrangements of well-known works of other composers. The works use instruments not normally used in orchestras, such as the bagpipes, slide whistle, kazoo, and fictional or experimental instruments such as the pastaphone (made of uncooked manicotti), tromboon, hardart, lasso d’amore, and left-handed sewer flute. The works also incorporate items not normally used as musical instruments, such as balloons, fog horns, and bicycles. His music also calls for unusual methods of playing traditional instruments, such as blowing through double reeds by themselves (that is, detached from the instruments) throughout Iphigenia in Brooklyn. His parts for vocalists include coughing, snoring, sobbing, laughing, and yelling.
P. D. Q. Bach's work pokes fun at musical genres including Baroque, Romantic, modern, country music (Oedipus Tex and Blaues Gras), and rap (Classical Rap). The "Schickele" or "S." numbers whimsically assigned to P. D. Q. Bach's works parody musicologists' catalogues of famous composers, such as the Kochel catalogue of Mozart’s works.
There is often a startling juxtaposition of styles within a single P. D. Q. Bach piece. The Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz, which alludes to Philip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach, provides an example. The underlying music is J.S. Bach’s first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, but at double the normal speed, with each phrase repeated interminably in a minimalist manner that parodies Glass's. On top of this mind-numbing structure is added everything from jazz phrases to snoring to heavily-harmonized versions of Three Blind Mice to the chanting of a meaningless phrase ("Koy Hotsy-Totsy," alluding to the art film Koyaanisqatsi for which Glass wrote the score). Through all these mutilations, the piece never deviates from Bach's original harmonic structure.
The humor in P. D. Q. Bach music often derives from violation of audience expectations, such as repeating a tune more than the usual number of times, resolving a musical chord later than usual or not at all, unusual key changes, excessive dissonance, or sudden switches from high art to low art. Further humor is obtained by replacing parts of certain classical pieces with similar common songs, such as the opening of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 with “Beautiful Dreamer”, or the opening of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with Yankee Doodle.
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