The Rest Is Silliness

“And they’re off! It’s very exciting—the beginning of a symphony is always very exciting. I can’t tell if it’s slow or fast yet because they keep . . . stopping.”

It’s 1997, I’m six years old, and my family has just pulled into the driveway of our home. The local public radio station is playing Peter Schickele’s “New Horizons in Music Appreciation.” We keep the car idling for the next eight minutes to hear it out—to date, the only “driveway moment” I can remember experiencing.

“New Horizons in Music Appreciation” takes the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and treats it as a sporting event, with a running commentary from two hammy announcers who remark on everything from the opening tempo to the oboe cadenza in the recapitulation. Some of the jokes are pitched at a general audience—at one point, a horn player flubs a note, and the hosts discuss the likelihood that he’ll be traded to another orchestra in the next season—but others require at least some knowledge of music theory. There’s an extended bit about how shocking it is that the piece is set to end in C major instead of C minor. 

Essentially all of these jokes fly over my head, and I sit in the back seat bewildered by my parents’ laughter. It seems unlikely that I had never heard the opening barrage of Beethoven’s Fifth before, but I’d certainly never listened to it attentively. I decide I have a solemn duty to study the piece so that the next time “New Horizons” comes on the air, I’ll get the jokes. I proceed to track down Beethoven’s Fifth in my family’s CD collection and listen to it over and over and over again. I was not a classical musician before this; after this, I will be.

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Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1935. Both of his parents had scientific bents—his father became the chair of North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Sciences Department in 1945, and his mother helped establish the importance of humidity in assessing dangerous heat conditions—but Peter took an early interest in music. As a high school student, he played bassoon in the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, and had his first composition lessons from their conductor at the time, Sigvald Thompson. He would go on to be the first music major at Swarthmore College before earning his master’s degree from Juilliard, where Philip Glass numbered among his contemporaries.

If Schickele had had the sort of career that most classical composers in this country pursue, his high school bassoonery might have been a light-hearted point of his biography, an interesting detail dropped into a bio to break up lists of ensembles and awards. He did not have that kind of career. 

In 1954, Schickele wrote a parody of J.S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”: the “Sanka Cantata.” Rather than take the credit himself, he attributed it to P.D.Q. Bach, a figure of his own invention whom he would later describe as the “last and oddest” of J.S.’s 20-odd children. What could have been a one-off joke turned into an annual series of concerts at Juilliard and eventually public outings at The Town Hall and beyond. Schickele presented himself as a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople whose research area was the “most justifiably neglected” of the Bach family composers and who kept unearthing new scores from garbage cans, gutters, and other unsavory locales. Recordings of these works would win four Grammys in a row, from 1989 to 1992.

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It’s 2007 or so, and I’m taking bassoon lessons in high school. My teacher, Becky Eldridge, sometimes regales me with tales of her time in various regional orchestras. One day, she describes a piece where she has to stick part of her bassoon into a trombone to create an unholy honking contraption. The piece is “The Seasonings” (Schickele number: ½ tsp), a grand oratorio by one P.D.Q. Bach. She digs out an LP recording of the piece, and we lose the better part of the lesson cackling. In addition to the flatulent tromboon, there’s a fugue cut short by orchestra management due to overtime constraints, a narrative recitative interrupted mid-syllable by a premature tutti, cadences so unexpected they feel like being hit in the face with a sonic frying pan.

I discover that my local library has several P.D.Q. Bach CDs. I check them out and listen to them devotedly. I learn that he has a work for bassoon and piano; it is one of the first pieces of solo literature I buy that isn’t required for a lesson or audition. The premise of the work is that the pianist is inexplicably absent, and so the hapless soloist must figure out how to play both instruments at once. When I play this work at summer camp, I accidentally cause a minor panic among the counselors: they think that my listed accompanist has actually gone missing on their watch.

Schickele also wrote pieces under his own name, and they’re mostly fine. That’s not an insult—as a composer, “fine” is actually quite difficult to achieve, and listening to one of Schickele’s own works is a perfectly pleasant way to pass the time. But it’s not surprising that his work with P.D.Q. Bach overshadowed his non-satirical pieces. There are, frankly, a lot of composers who sound more or less like Schickele—tuneful, consonant but not strictly tonal, rhythmically sprightly. There’s no one in the world who sounds like P.D.Q. Bach. 

When people write about P.D.Q. Bach, they often take pains to discuss the quality of the compositional technique under all the jokes. It’s as if they’re saying, “This is actually good stuff, even though it’s funny.” To my mind, this is exactly backwards: It can only be so funny because it’s so carefully constructed. Humor lives and dies in the tiniest details—writing good comedy is hard.

It’s hard, and it’s also not trivial. Classical music’s boosters often tout this genre’s passages of spiritual transcendence, its moments of profound grief and consolation. These are important parts of the human experience to be sure, and it’s wonderful that this music can speak to them, but they are not the sum total of our emotional landscapes. Playfulness, irreverence, goofiness are part of us too, and life would be lesser without them in it. It is a mistake to equate artistic greatness with emotional sobriety. P.D.Q. Bach’s best compositions are, genuinely, masterpieces, magnificent expressions of the deepest currents of joyful absurdity. They are great works not in spite of their humor, but because of it.

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It’s the winter of 2015, and I’m at the 50th anniversary P.D.Q. Bach concert at The Town Hall in New York. The music is well played and the audience reception is warm, but there’s an undeniable valedictory energy in the air. The concert feels like a farewell not just to the P.D.Q. Bach phenomenon, but to an entire ethos of classical music, an ethos of meeting this music at eye level, neither on a distant podium of elite swankiness nor as a waste of time and money. There’s a come-as-you-are enthusiasm to much of P.D.Q. Bach’s work, a welcome embrace of anyone, regardless of their knowledge of classical music as a genre and an ecosystem. Sure, there are jokes that lean on a familiarity with concert hall conventions and canonical works, but there are also plenty of puns, slapstick escapades, and fart noises. Wherever you’re at on the scale of classical music knowledge, there’s something there for you.

This is an ethos I try to take with me in my own musical career. When I write program notes, I highlight features of interest for those in the know while also offering a hand to those who may never have been to a classical concert before. When I invite non-musical friends along with me to a show, I encourage them to have whatever reactions they have without regard for what they’re “supposed” to think and feel. When I compose, I’m almost always playing some recherché game, but the point remains the emotional journey, not the artifice. I don’t want classical music to be something distant and ethereal, to be approached only with caution, delicacy, and prolonged education. I want it to be something right here right now, something you can reach into and get your hands dirty with.

This is a form of love. Maurice Sendak once sent a postcard with an original drawing to a young boy who had written him a fan letter; the boy’s mother then wrote back that the boy had loved the postcard so much he had eaten it. This is the kind of love I get from the work of P.D.Q. Bach, the kind of love I feel for classical music. Dear Mr. Beethoven, I loved your symphony so much I mashed it up with “Camptown Races” and also there’s a double reed slide music stand involved now. More than anything, this is how I will be remembering Peter Schickele, and how I encourage you to remember him, too: Love something so much you eat it. And then go stick part of a bassoon on the end of a trombone. ¶

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Peter Schickele died at his home on January 16, 2024, at the age of 88. His family is directing donations in his memory to the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony.