Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Wurst of PDQ Bach by Peter Schickele (1986)

A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
The Wurst of P.D.Q. Bach by Peter Schickele (1986)

“PDQ Bach” is the nom-de-plume of Peter Schickele, a classically-trained musical humorist. I can’t say I know an awful lot about him or his music-surprisingly, since I’m a fan of satire and music. But based on this album, I can say that goofy music theorists and music historians are this guy’s target audience. I remember hearing his take on the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a baseball game way back in music history class, studying sonata-allegro form. So, the ideas behind his humor-pretty highbrow. The sounding music-pretty low-brow at times. I’m going home to listen to this album since it’s been awhile.
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So, what Schickele does is mess around with a listener’s expectations. When listening to Mozart, there are just so many broad categories of sound you are likely to hear. There are musical patterns that are common in music of his time and about a hundred years before and after. What Schickele does on this double-CD set is establish an aesthetic and then subtly, (and not so subtly), go off into foreign territory. Sometimes he deceptively resolves a passage, or doesn’t resolve at all, or abandons keys for another with no preparation, or uses odd instruments or rhythmic figures. It’s all kind of amusing stuff. I really should listen to it more often.

When listening today to his mock oratorio _Iphigenia in Brooklyn_, there were several passages scored for trumpet mouthpiece and bassoon reeds that made me chuckle out loud.

I remember when I was in college, presenting a paper that compared the satirical methods of Jonathan Swift and Frank Zappa, one English teacher suggested I should instead focus on Schickele. I bristled at the mere idea. (As I’ve said before, Zappa was a hero to me.) And as I think about it, the textbooks should include these two as the opposing archetypes of musical satire: Schickele being the more good-natured, Horatian satirist and Zappa being the Juvenalian example. I don’t know why, but I like Zappa’s music more, maybe because he is conversant in a larger scope of musical styles that Schickele, who is more of a specialist in skewering the music of the Common Practice Period.

posted by Mike @ 1:37 PM