P.D.Q. Bach is a fictional composer created by the American composer and musical satirist Peter Schickele for a five-decade career performing the “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 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 damned quick”.
Schickele began working on the character while studying at the Aspen Music Festival and School and Juilliard, and performed a variety of P.D.Q. Bach shows over many years. The Village Voice mentions the juxtaposition of collage, bitonality, musical satire, and orchestral surrealism in a “bizarre melodic stream of consciousness … In P.D.Q. Bach he has single-handedly mapped a musical universe that everyone knew was there and no one else had the guts (not simply the bad taste) to explore.” In 2012, Schickele reduced his touring due to age. On December 28 and 29, 2015, at The Town Hall in New York, he performed two concerts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first concert. Schickele died on January 16, 2024, aged 88.
Schickele wrote a humorous fictional biography of the composer according to which P.D.Q. Bach was born in Leipzig on April 1, 1742, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach; the twenty-first of Johann Sebastian’s twenty children. He is also referred to as “the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian’s 20-odd children”. He died May 5, 1807, though his birth and death years are often listed on album literature in reverse, as “(1807–1742)?”. According to Schickele, P.D.Q. “possessed the originality of Johann Christian, the arrogance of Carl Philipp Emanuel, and the obscurity of Johann Christoph Friedrich”.
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. 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’s opera Einstein on the Beach, provides an example. The underlying music is Johann Sebastian 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. On top of this mind-numbing structure is added everything from jazz phrases to snoring to heavily harmonised versions of “Three Blind Mice” to the chanting of a meaningless phrase (“Coy 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 humour 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 humour is obtained by replacing parts of certain classical pieces with similar common songs, such as the opening of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 with “Beautiful Dreamer”, or rewriting Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as the 1712 Overture with “Yankee Doodle” replacing Tchaikovsky’s melody and “Pop Goes the Weasel” replacing “La Marseillaise”.
