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Peter Schickele, noted composer, musician, author, and satirist, was
born on July 17, 1935, in Ames, Iowa, and brought up in Washington, D.C.
and Fargo, North Dakota. He studied composition with Roy Harris
and Darius Milhaud, and at The Juilliard School of Music with Vincent Persichetti
and William Bergsma. Then, under a Ford Foundation grant, he composed
music for high schools in Los Angeles before returning to teach at Juilliard
in 1961. In 1965 he gave up teaching to become the freelance composer/performer
he has been ever since. In the course of his career Schickele has also
created music for four feature films, among them the prize-winning Silent
Running, as well as for documentaries, television commercials, several
Sesame Street segments and an underground movie that he has never seen
in its finished state. He was also one of the composer/lyricists
for Oh! Calcutta!, and has arranged for Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie
and other folk singers.
Peter
Schickele is most noted for his portrayal of P.D.Q. Bach, Johann
Sebastian’s last and least (and fictional) offspring.
P.D.Q. Bach once said that his illustrious father gave him no
training in music whatsoever, and it is one of the few things he said that
we can believe without reservation. His rebelliousness was such,
in fact, that he avoided music as much as possible until he was well into
his thirties (as a teenager he did assist in the construction of the loudest
instrument ever created, the pandemonium, but he wisely skipped town before
the instrument’s completion, having sensed with uncanny accuracy, that
the Pavilion of Glass was perhaps not the most felicitous location for
the inaugural concert). But by the mid 1770s he realized that, given
his last name, writing music was the easiest thing he could do, and he
began composing the works that were to catapult him into obscurity.
Peter Schickele
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