For Peter Schickele

In 1980, when I was twelve, I went to see PDQ Bach, aka Peter Schickele, at Wolf Trap, outside Washington DC. Having already become a PDQ enthusiast, I brought along my family's shoebox-sized cassette-tape recorder, not realizing that recording concerts was illegal. As it turned out, the tape I made was useless, because all you could hear was my shrieking, cackling laughter. I doubt I've laughed so hard at anything since. The magnificent Schickele, the most recent of an immortal succession of musical humorists that includes Gerard Hoffnung, Anna Russell, and Victor Borge, died on January 16 at the age of eighty-eight. Margalit Fox wrote a wonderfully thorough and affectionate obituary for the New York Times; Allan Kozinn did the master mangler justice in the Washington Post. Brin Solomon, at VAN, thoughtfully ponders Schickele's musical gifts. There's a great deal of Schickeliana online, including many delightful versions of Last Tango in Bayreuth; see especially the Breaking Winds and the University of Michigan Bassoon Studio. Above, one of Schickele's so-called "serious" works — although the key to his appeal was that he was never completely serious and never completely silly. He was, as I wrote back in 2015, "the one American composer whose name makes everyone smile."