Peter Schickele

Peter Schickele (July 17, 1935 – January 16, 2024) was an American composer, musical educator, parodist, and Broadway performer born in Ames, Iowa. His father, Rainer Schickele, was an Alsatian immigrant and agricultural economist who taught at Iowa State University before relocating the family first to Washington, D.C. and then to Fargo, North Dakota, where he chaired the Agricultural Sciences Department at North Dakota Agricultural College. In Fargo, the younger Schickele studied composition with Sigvald Thompson of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra and graduated from Fargo Central High School in 1952. He then attended Swarthmore College, where he was among the first students to earn a music degree, graduating in 1957. He subsequently enrolled at the Juilliard School, studying composition under Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti and earning a master's degree in musical composition in 1960.

During his time at Juilliard, Schickele collaborated with conductor Jorge Mester in 1959 to present a humorous concert that became an annual event at the school. In 1965, he brought the concept to The Town Hall in New York City, where Vanguard Records recorded the performance and released it as an album, establishing the fictional composer P. D. Q. Bach as a public persona. Schickele presented P. D. Q. Bach as the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian Bach's twenty-odd children, building an elaborate comedic mythology around the character, including a fictitious academic home at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, where the character held tenure as "Very Full Professor" of "musicolology" and "musical pathology." By 1972, the P. D. Q. Bach concerts had grown large enough to move to Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Schickele performed two concerts at The Town Hall in December 2015 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first public P. D. Q. Bach performance there.

The P. D. Q. Bach catalog includes such works as The Abduction of Figaro, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, Oedipus Tex, the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, and Einstein on the Fritz, the last of which parodies the work of Schickele's Juilliard classmate Philip Glass. For the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, Schickele invented the Hardart, a tone-generating device built onto the frame of a coin-operated automat food dispenser, taking its name from the Horn and Hardart restaurant chain. He also invented several other unconventional instruments, among them the tromboon, described as a cross between a trombone and a bassoon possessing the disadvantages of both; the dill piccolo; the left-handed sewer flute; the lasso d'amore; the tuba mirum, a flexible tube filled with wine; and the pastaphone, an uncooked tube of pasta played as a horn. His P. D. Q. Bach recordings earned him four consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album from 1990 through 1993.

Schickele's Broadway career included an appearance in 1969 in the revue Oh! Calcutta!, for which he was a member of the chamber rock trio the Open Window, which wrote and performed the show's music. The group also released three albums. Beyond Broadway, Schickele wrote arrangements and orchestrations for folk musician Joan Baez across three albums during the mid-1960s: Noël (1966), Joan (1967), and Baptism (1968). He composed the score for the 1972 science fiction film Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern, and co-wrote the songs "Silent Running" and "Rejoice in the Sun" with Diane Lampert for that project. He also composed an animated adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which he narrated, and wrote more than 100 original works for symphony orchestra, choral groups, chamber ensemble, and voice.

As a musical educator, Schickele hosted the classical music radio program Schickele Mix on public radio stations across the United States and internationally through Public Radio International. The program began in 1992, ceased production of new episodes by 1999 due to lack of funding, and ended rebroadcasts in June 2007. Of the 169 programs produced, 119 were included in the rebroadcast rotation. His music is published by the Theodore Presser Company, and his papers are held at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.

Schickele married poet Susan Sindall on October 27, 1962. Their two children, Matt and Karla, are both musicians and performed together in the trio Beekeeper during the 1990s; Karla is also an orchestral composer. His brother David Schickele (1937–1999) was a film director and musician. Peter Schickele died at his home in Bearsville, New York, on January 16, 2024, at the age of 88, following a series of infections that damaged his health.