Peter Schickele: P.D.Q. Bach

Matthew Paris interviews Peter Schickele, a.k.a. P.D.Q. Bach.

Paris writes:

Peter Schickele is one of the most urbane and witty people in conversation one might meet n, New York. His humor in his table talk tends toward irony, not horselaughs he puts into his P.D.Q. Bach music. Peter was most influenced by listening to the radio as a kid in a Fargo, North Dakota. People in that part of the world had a lot of wilderness in all directions as they looked out the window. One would never guess that Peter came from such a place from his current urbane manner. We did discuss how much country music run by stations with extensive and robust signals influenced people in the West and Northwest as well as the South.

Peter, like all geniuses, has no airs, talks to people as if he has always known them. Maybe he's neighborly and friendly in the manner of the West. He said he's always been a natural clown. Peter studied at Juilliard, but I guess what he learned there was theory and how important it was to play a lot of instruments in the orchestra. More Peter studied personally with Roy Harris and felt a strong resonance with him. Harris was in his time the only composer besides Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland that seemed to be able to define American music by giving it an idiom, sort of what Dvorak did for Czech music. It's hard to imagine anyone like Peter hanging out with Roy Harris, hardly a humorist, but Peter did it for years.

Some genius like Thorsten Veblen are stingy with their talent; others like Peter, are always being who they are no matter what the situation is. For them, genius is a full-time life discipline.

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