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P.D.Q. Bach's Alter Ego
| Article
# : |
16375 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
2,997 Words |
| Author
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Richard Kostelanetz
Richard Kostelanetz is a writer/composer living in New
York. His recent books include On Innovative Music(ian)s
(Limelight). His latest composition, Kaddish, was commissioned
by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. |
[Saul] Steinberg's role automatically disguises itself, and his performance continues to prompt people to ask, "But is he really an artist?"--the question by which each legitimate avant-garde has been greeted.
--Harold Rosenberg,
Art on the Edge
P.D.Q. Bach has been such a successful innovation that he has all but obscured the existence of his creator, a composer named Peter Schickele, who scarcely resembles his alter ego. Whereas P.D.Q. is portrayed as a sot, Schickele himself is virtually abstemious; whereas P.D.Q. is self-defeating, Schickele has been industrious; whereas P.D.Q. was reportedly too incompetent to receive music lessons, Schickele has had an elaborate education, not only in music but in the liberal arts as well. If the pseudo-historic Bach was a jerk, his creator is anything but. Whereas P.D.Q. was born in Germany, "the 21st of Bach's 20 children," Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, July 17, 1935, the son of a German-born professor of agricultural economics. Whereas P.D.Q. is famous, Schickele himself is not--were P.D.Q. to board a New York City subway, people would stop and stare, while Schicke himself rides it, undisturbed, all the time.
Nonetheless, P.D.Q. Bach is a unique figure in the history of classical music, a pseudo-eighteenth-century composer whose works were "discovered" in the twentieth. Under his name have appeared more than seventy-five individual pieces, for various instrumentation, all of them comic, some of them quite classic. The records issued under his name over the past quarter century are all in print; so is The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
... (1998 of 18306 Characters)
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