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The Great PDQ Bach has passed!
AKA Peter Schickele passed on 1/17/23 at 88 years of age.
Peter Schickele who has died aged 88, was better known as the fictional composer PDQ Bach, whose Victor Borge-style parodies delighted and entertained audiences; he was equally inventive with instruments, coming up with a trombone-bassoon combination known as the tromboon and the left-handed sewer flute.
A grizzly-bearded, Brahms-like figure, Schickele looked like a refugee from a psychedelic Sixties rock band. He claimed to be head of musical pathology at the non-existent University of Southern North Dakota in Hoople, where he was engaged in excavating the work of PDQ Bach, “history’s most justifiably neglected composer”.
His creation took on a life of its own, with a back story that cast a wickedly irreverent eye over the more pretentious aspects of musical scholarship. PDQ Bach (born 1807, died 1742) was the “last and least talented” of Johann Sebastian’s 20 sons and credited with composing anything that traditional musicologists loved to unearth in dusty archives: oratorios, cantatas, motets and madrigals.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/peter-schickele-composer-impish-parodist-and-discoverer-of-the-works-of-pdq-bach-obituary/ar-BB1gXupw
https://www.schickele.com/wp/p-d-q-bach/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schickele
https://www.schickele.com/wp/
7 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
And his tenure at the University of Southern North Dakota, among his many accomplishments….
I've been a fan for decades... first saw him on Johnny Carson and have been a fan since. His radio show ran on the stations around here, it was while I was engaged in the classical performance mode so it was definitely on my Saturday schedule.
He's definitely a musicians' comedian, the more you know about music the funnier he is. His snark also takes more than a few nips at academia as well. A joy of many sorts.
