The Rest Is Silliness: Peter Schickele and PDQ Bach remembered | Hacker News Reader

The Rest Is Silliness: Peter Schickele and PDQ Bach remembered

van-magazine.com

98 pointslaurex13 comments

Ah, I hadn’t heard he’d passed away. He was important to me growing up as a nerdy trombone player.

I remember attending one of his concerts, arriving a little late, and I stepped into the concert hall, walked a bit down the aisle to a seat, and less than a minute behind me the door opened again and another man - must have been PDQ, can’t quite remember now - tore down the aisle, leap on stage, and played the final chord of the piece, a comic touch characteristic of his work.

This is a version I haven't seen before of my favorite piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg

Hilarious, thank you. Pythonworthy, even, "philosophers game" style.

(Ten minutes of "symphony as football", with running commentary)

P.S. they keep piling on the jokes, at 8 min. injured bass player replacement comes in strumming Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" ...

Recent and related:

Peter Schickele, composer and gleeful sire of P.D.Q. Bach, dies at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39037425 - Jan 2024 (23 comments)

He is remembered for laffs, but he was a very very compelling composer.

An amusing moment in my college years was when a roommate was trying to broaden his mind by listening to classical — but unwittingly downloaded PDQ. It sounded _almost_ authentic, but had the classic Schickele twists that gave it away.

I’ve not heard much of his music (I must remedy that), but I remember hearing one of his pieces (perhaps on Prairie Home Companion?) which was an operatic setting of a joke (“transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises”) and it elucidated so much of how opera worked structurally that I never got from listening to actual operas. There’s a lot of education hidden in the jokes.

Reading his sheet music can be almost as much fun as watching him perform. I can remember seeing one piece with a tempo note that read, "Mit Schlag" [1]. I laughed so hard I couldn't see.

[1] For those who don't speak German, this phrase literally means, "with impact" but idiomatically it means "with whipped cream." It's generally used when ordering desert.

I played his Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano in college. At the time I knew all about PDQ Bach, but I wasn't aware of his serious compositions until I played the piece. It was really quite lovely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMbwNtWZABA

I loved the record with "Iphigenia in Brooklyn" (including and especially the Schickele 'Quodlibet' --- need to listen again, I expect to discover new jokes there).

A couple of years ago, I found at a thrift shop a bunch of PDQ Bach recordings that I hadn't heard, and grabbed them.

When I played them, the jokes didn't seem to work the way they did when I was twenty.

I was sad then about that, and sad now. I need to figure out how to recover the delight.

FWIW, I found and played a youtube sound+score of the Quodlibet. I have not figured out if it breaks the magic or increases the understanding or even intimacy with the work. Leaning to the latter.

What a loss for the world of music. My mom introduced me to his work through “WTWP: Wall to Wall Pachelbel”, an album that would become a staple on roadtrips. It takes a really gifted mind to make musical jokes, and Professor Pete was uniquely qualified to do so. He will be missed, despite living on through his music. May his memory be for a blessing.

I remember listening both to the few PDQ Bach albums my parents owned and then his excellent radio show on music theory and concepts. I found some old episodes online and have been enjoying them again the last few days.

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