Many years ago, I put up a page called “The Key of P. D. Q.” It’s still there, though I haven’t updated it in decades. It lists musical parodies by Peter Schickele under the name P. D. Q. Bach and names pieces of classical and popular music they quote. This gave way to the P. D. Q. Bach Wiki on fandom.com, or “WikiPDQ,” as I like to call it. I contributed to it for a while. It’s probably the best online source for details about the music, but wikis are fragile things, and not all the information on them is verified.

So I’m starting a new project, where so far I’m reusing the name “The Key of P. D. Q.” It will be an e-book, most likely for free, since I doubt that there’s a market for it. It will be a PDF document, which is good for preservation. I’ll probably make it available for free in several places, such as one of my websites and Scribd.

I’ve been a P. D. Q. Bach fan for over half a century. I love spotting the hidden jokes in the music. The book will have an entry on each piece I can get information about, taking a light tone while digging into the technical tricks Schickele used. That’s a tricky balance, and I’m working on how to do it best. These pieces can give people a fun introduction to classical music, and I’ll work on explaining the connections between the satires and their models.

An early target will be a public or semi-public alpha version. It will have articles on just some of the music, so readers can comment on the approach I’m taking and suggest tweaks.