PDQ Bach

A P.D.Q. Bach discovery

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I’ve put up a video on YouTube of a P.D.Q. Bach piece which perhaps no one had heard in years. It’s “Two and a Half Variations on In Dulce Jubilo. Peter Schickele’s website lists the piece and says it was performed on the December 23, 2000 episode of A Prairie Home Companion. I couldn’t find any recording of it on YouTube. Thankfully, all or most of the show’s episodes are available online. Less fortunately, the site only lets you play episodes from beginning to end, with no fast forward capability.

So I captured the whole episode on audio and then excerpted the piece and cleaned up the clip a little with Audacity. Then I combined it with a stock still picture and uploaded it to YouTube. If I’m lucky, no one will request a takedown. A lot of other P.D.Q. Bach pieces are on YouTube.

The circumstances of the composition and the instrumentation were unusual, even for Schickele. The show arranged a face-off for him and Bill McLaughlin to create the most unusual arrangement of a Christmas song. Each one assigned four instruments to the other. Knowing there’s no instrument unusual enough to faze Schickele, McLaughlin had him write a piece for koto, musical saw, krummhorn, and serpent. He then asked whether the piece should be credited to Schickele or P.D.Q. Bach, and Schickele claimed it was his newest P.D.Q. Bach “discovery.”

Unlike most pieces by the fictional composer, it doesn’t have a Schickele number. I’ve assigned it WoS (Werke ohne Schickelezahl) 11.

Announcing the P. D. Q. Bach project!   Recently updated !

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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.