Peter Schickele

Although Peter Schickele earned recognition as a composer, musicologist, performer, and radio host, his greatest fame came from unearthing the works of P.D.Q. Bach, the invented youngest and least talented offspring of J.S. Bach.

Raised in a household of amateur musicians, he spent his early years in Washington, D.C., before moving to Fargo, where he served as the community’s sole bassoonist. His first composition instructor was Sigvald Thompson, leader of the Fargo-Moorhead Orchestra. At Swarthmore College he remained the sole music major; upon receiving his degree in 1957 he had already produced chamber pieces, songs that included rock numbers, and four orchestral scores while also supplying arrangements to dance bands and jazz ensembles. Hindemith, Bartók, Elvis, and Ray Charles left their mark, yet Stravinsky and the Everly Brothers proved especially decisive.

Further study took him first to Roy Harris and Darius Milhaud, then to William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard. A Ford Foundation grant allowed him to write for Los Angeles high schools, after which he joined the Juilliard faculty from 1961 to 1965. He subsequently devoted himself to composition, arranging, and performance from his New York City base, shared with his wife, the poet Susan Sindall.

Arrangements for Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and additional folk artists followed, along with scores for the film Silent Running, various documentaries, and television segments that included contributions to Sesame Street. Between 1968 and 1971 he joined composers Robert Dennis and Stanley Walden in the chamber-rock ensemble Open Window, which appeared in solo and mixed-media programs as well as with symphony orchestras, supplied songs for the stage, and served as the pit band for the musical Oh, Calcutta!.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Schickele concentrated on the growing catalog of P.D.Q. Bach, a body of works that simultaneously satirized, spoofed, and paid tribute to an array of classical masterpieces. These pieces had first surfaced at end-of-season concerts at Juilliard and the Aspen Music Festival beginning in 1959. Public performances commenced in 1965, eventually yielding more than a dozen recordings—several of which received Grammy awards—and the volume The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, credited to the works’ “discoverer,” “Professor” Peter Schickele.

In 1992 Schickele launched the public-radio series Schickele Mix, which traced unexpected links among music from the ancient world, J.S. Bach, and Motown. The program earned ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 1993 and continued until 1999. He also held composer-in-residence posts at schools and festivals while accepting commissions from organizations that included the Saint Louis Symphony, the Minnesota Opera, the Lark and Audubon quartets, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In addition he regularly produced “personal” compositions, many of them rounds, created as mementos for friends and occasions. Schickele died at age 88 in January 2024 at his home in Bearsville, New York.