In the 1960s, the Grammy-winning composer and infamous musical satirist received a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, just south of Springfield.
"For me, Fargo (South Dakota) will ever feeling like my hometown, and moving from Fargo to Pennsylvania, surprisingly enough, did not expect that much adjustment," Schickele said in a telephone interview from his summer house in Woodstock, N.
.
"Fargo was a little city, and Swarthmore had a similar feel, even though we were in the apparition of Philadelphia," Schickele recalled. "But all in all, I loved living in Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore gave me a great basic education that's really gone far toward . giving me the ethnic background that has enriched my calling as a musician."
The writer of more than 100 deeds for orchestras, choral groups, chamber ensembles, film and television, Schickele will go to Lancaster this week to accept Lancaster Symphony Orchestra's 2007 Composer's Award.
At Swarthmore, Schickele was something of an oddity: He was the sole student enrolled as a music major.
"I had no thought what I wanted to do with my life, and my parents wanted me to see a liberal arts school, so that's how I wound up at Swarthmore," he said. "Originally, you know, Swarthmore was a Quaker College, and Quakers aren't really known for their bed of music."
Schickele dedicated much of his sentence at college to composition, completing his first violin concerto while he was even an undergraduate.
"I knew that as shortly as I graduated, I required to get into a conservatory, so that's how I wound up going to Juilliard," he said. "But I'll ever be thankful for what Swarthmore gave me - a great education and an awareness of a larger world."
"That's one of the many reasons why it's release to be such a joy for me to get second to Pennsylvania."
To honor Schickele, Lancaster Symphony will do two of his works, "An American Birthday Card" and "One for the Money," during its final concert of the season next weekend. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 headlines the engagement, and guest violinist Jonathan Carney will be featured in Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto.
The nativity of PDQ Bach
During his years at Juilliard, Schickele said, he "majored in cafeteria," with many of his friends spending long hours talking about medicine and sharing humorous anecdotes over meals.
During one of his spring semesters at Juilliard, Schickele said, the government asked him to devise some form for the 2nd half of one of the institution's frequent in-house concerts. Schickele and his lunchroom friends put together a 15-piece ad-hoc orchestra and played satirical pieces they wrote themselves.
"That was the nativity of PDQ Bach," he said. "He made his entry at a little New York City concert in 1965, and word started getting around. Soon afterwards that, the disk label Vanguard recorded one of the concerts for release, and after 42 years, I'm still doing it."
Billed as the bastard son of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, PDQ Bach is Schickele's alter ego. PDQ boasts 17 albums and an annual concert in New York City devoted almost entirely to the composer's satire, which some say borders on genius.
Meanwhile Schickele has continued making "good" music. Highlights include a hit for the film "Silent Running"; a Grammy-winning album, "Hornsmoke," featuring brass instrumentation; a celebrated string quintet, "American Dreams"; and yet a collaboration with 1960s icon Joan Baez.
"We were both recording on the Vanguard label, and Joan wanted to do a Christmas album complete with a really lush string quartet doing Renaissance carols. Since the label knew I had a lot of experience with other historical musical styles, I was brought in to do the arrangements," he said. "And as it turned out, Joan liked working with me so often that she too had me do in for her albums 'Joan' and 'Baptism.'"
Working with Baez, Schickele said, was interesting because they had an unspoken understanding in the studio.
"We knew not to intervene with each other. If she didn't like something I was doing with the arrangements, we would simply do it over again, but really, she had such amazing respect for, and faith in, the people she was running with," Schickele said. "She's a lovely lady."
Currently, Schickele intends to go through June and so bit his attention once again to composing. He's slated to compose a woodwind quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn and bassoon, and besides has been licensed to save an Abraham Lincoln-themed orchestral piece for the Louisville (Ky. Orchestra.
Schickele considers winning Lancaster Symphony's Composer's Award a great honor because "they're honoring the two sides of my life, both as Peter Schickele, the composer, and as also as PDQ Bach."
"This isn't something like, say, an award from a music school. This [present] is something being given out by people who know music. And for me, that's what makes receiving it so special."
Lancaster Symphony Orchestra will have four performances at Fulton Opera House in downtown Lancaster beginning Friday and run through the weekend. For tickets and showtimes, call 397-7425 or visit www.thefulton.org.
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