This afternoon a relative and I had the great pleasure of attending the San Francisco Symphony's hilarious event A P.D.Q. Bach Christmas. The man behind the music, a composer and musician named Peter Schickele, employs the persona of Professor Peter Schickele of the (fictitious) University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.
The pieces were simply delightful (and humorous, too), with standard concert instruments (piano, flute, cello, etc.), but also many of the unexpected: an enormous gong struck with a mallet; a drum kit; and a "proctophone." Presumably one of Schickele's own inventions, this last consists of a white rubber glove into which the player blows, thus inflating it and producing a sort of flatulent sound—thus delighting children and adults alike. Also of note at one point was the moment that the conductor became distracted by texting on a mobile phone, and another when Schickele was pulled over by a traffic officer for playing too quickly on the piano ("Is this your piano?" "Do you know how fast you were playing?") Yet another highlight (for me) was when Schickele told us all about a technique developed by P.D.Q. Bach for playing arpeggios on organ pedals with the feet alone, called the "tootsie roll." This received hisses from a large portion of the audience. Some people just don't like a good joke.
Once we retired to the Green Room afterwards, I got my paperback copy of The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach autographed and had a mobile phone photograph taken with the great man himself (a picture which I shall cherish, despite its being somewhat blurry).
Who is this P.D.Q. Bach character? Without giving too much away, he's a fictional (yes, fictional) composer, ostensibly the twenty-first of Johann Sebastian Bach's twenty children (think about that for a moment), invented by the aforementioned Peter Schickele. A lot of his work plays off of romantic and baroque music, but he does a lot based on swing, oldies, jazz, and even more modern material (you are, of course, more likely to find The Beatles than to find Aqua, regardless of the cultural or intellectual validity of either, due simply to the target demographic).
According to the San Francisco Symphony's website, Schickele has been performing the works of his alter-ego (please don't tell him I used that term!) P.D.Q. Bach since 1965, and he's still going strong, and as funny as ever! I urge you to visit his website if you like; it's not a shiny, bells-and-whistles affair, but it may give one an idea of what this intellectual fellow is really about.
