MUSIC : Adieu, P.D.Q.--Almost : After more than 25 years of missionary work for the 'oddest' of J.S. Bach's children, Peter Schickele is giving the shtick a rest

By JOHN HENKEN

March 31, 1991 12 AM PT

<i> John Henken is a regular contributor to The Times. </i>

It is 30 minutes before curtain with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Peter Schickele is in his dressing room, rehearsing lines sotto voce and writing notes.

“As I get older, I have to write these things bigger and bigger,” Schickele sighs.

“And your handwriting is getting worse and worse,” adds Bill Walters, Schickele’s longtime stage manager and straight man.

“That’s not possible,” Schickele retorts.

The sight is subtly incongruous. The burly, bearded Schickele is clad in tux and work boots, reciting lines such as “How many Californians does it take to play a trio sonata?” in a completely reasonable voice, as if the question might occur to anybody.

“This is ridiculous, why did I write it?” Schickele asks about some of the more unlikely aspects of the “oddest of J.S. Bach’s 20-odd children,” P.D.Q. Bach, and his implausible life (1807-1742). “Because its true, I’m only reporting,” he reassures himself.

Before leaving the dressing room, Schickele examines his appearance closely, setting the red suspenders just so, tugging loose a shirt-tail and fluffing out his hair into a manic mane.

Still backstage, Schickele checks his instruments and props, which range from the tromboon--an instrument he discovered in junior high school by connecting a bassoon mouthpiece to a trombone--to balloons and a table full of breakfast appurtenances.

You might imagine that after more than a quarter-century of performing as the Professor--discoverer of P.D.Q. Bach and crazed head of the music pathology department of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople--Schickele could get into character automatically.

But he has eight completely different, carefully scripted programs he can do with an orchestra, and his calculation of comedic cause and effect is precise, his control over the seemingly spontaneous mayhem strict. To achieve that at the January Philharmonic concert, Schickele surprises everyone at one point by coming offstage unexpectedly. He hurriedly sticks a pin in his shirt, needed to pop a balloon in the finale of one program.

“I forgot the pin!” he exclaims urgently. “The audience can’t see me put the pin in.”

With Schickele leading them on, even P.D.Q. neophytes in the crowd quickly learn their part, joining the enthusiastic hissing that greets some of his more outrageous puns. “Listen,” he tells the crowd sternly, “I can take this a lot longer than you.”

Maybe not. Schickele is preparing to cut off the live shows despite a demand for P.D.Q. Bach that has never been higher. Spurred by 26 years of public performances, Schickele--or rather the Professor and P.D.Q. Bach--enjoys a recognition factor that far surpasses many classical music stars who have remained on the narrow path. His first two Telarc CDs won Grammys for best comedy recording and 11 of his older Vanguard albums have been re-released on CD.

“Farewell Concert,” trumpet the Pasadena Civic Auditorium’s ads for Monday’s performance with Jorge Mester and the Pasadena Symphony, the end of a national goodby tour. The claim is no joke--although it is, appropriately, April Fools’ Day, of course--but it does require some elaboration.

“I’ve never called this the end,” Schickele, 55, says. “I’m not burning any bridges here. If I start touring again, I’ll call it ‘The I-Was-Only-Kidding Tour.’ ”

What Schickele does intend to do is to take an indefinite sabbatical from the road. Since the first public P.D.Q. concert in 1965, the “discovery” and propagation of P.D.Q. Bach’s music has become a full-time job, overwhelming many of Schickele’s other interests.

“There are things that have come up in the last couple of decades that I haven’t been able to pursue,” Schickele says. “For example, I was offered the buffo title role in Sousa’s “El Capitan” once, but I would have had to block out all that time. Stopping the touring is partly just a matter of wanting to free up time.”

To get an idea of what free time might produce from the musical cottage industry that is Peter Schickele, consider what already lies behind P.D.Q. Bach:

Nine film scores, ranging from the acclaimed sci-fi ecological fable “Silent Running” to an animated short of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Television scores, including several “Sesame Street” episodes.

Theater scores and songs, ranging from Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” to “Oh! Calcutta!”

Arrangements and compositions for the cream of the folk-revival movement, including albums for Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richard and Mimi Farina and Jeff Monn.

Concerts and recordings with his fusion trio, the Open Window, plus “Good-Time Ticket,” an album of his instrumental interpretations of songs by Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

More than 70 compositions under his own name, including the “American Dreams” Quartet recorded by the Audubon String Quartet on RCA.

The Peter Schickele Rag, his own fanzine to which he contributes a crossword puzzle each issue.

As if that were not enough, his future plans include radio and television. The P.D.Q. Bach recording he is currently preparing for Telarc is the form of a mock radio broadcast, “with several deejays so we can indulge in inane banter.

“I’ve also been developing ideas for a radio program of my own, for which we’ve made a pilot. It’s too early to say this is going to happen, but I hope it will. It’s not P.D.Q., but rather playing recorded music--all kinds--and talking about it. I also have a television show of music for kids in the works--though not as far along--which I will host.”

“I was involved in funny and weird stuff from the beginning,” Schickele laughs, noting an early infatuation with Spike Jones and home theater. “My getting involved with music pretty much coincided with my family’s move to Fargo (N.D.). My brother was a fiddler, and an avid string quartet player.”

P.D.Q. Bach was discovered in the summer of 1953, when Schickele was home after his first year at Swarthmore College. Through overdubbing, he and two friends recorded one of the “Brandenburg” concertos on various instruments.

“The results, although they sounded like mud wrestling, were a lot of fun. I showed up the next week with ‘The Sanka Cantata.’ We decided to make a tape of it in the form of a radio broadcast. To this day, I don’t remember who came up with the name P.D.Q. Bach.”

From Swarthmore, Schickele went on to Juilliard. “I majored in cafeteria,” he says, “sitting around for hours with Jorge Mester, Phil Glass and others.”

In May, 1959, Schickele and Mester were both at Aspen, where Schickele was in Darius Milhaud’s composition class. He wrote “Sinfonia Concertante”--featuring the left-handed sewer flute and double-reed slide music stand--for an Aspen concert, which became an annual tradition.

Mester remembers the concert well. “I was mid-husband to the birth of P.D.Q.,” he says. “It was a benefit concert--we took in less than $82.”

Then at Juilliard, Schickele and friends, at the last minute, were offered half of a student program after another performer dropped out.

“This music was done literally overnight,” Schickele remembers. “While they were rehearsing the first movement we were copying out the parts for the last movement.”

The first public performance of P.D.Q. Bach was April 24, 1965, at New York’s Town Hall, launching another annual series.

“We did crazy things at the Town Hall,” recalls Mester, who conducted the chamber orchestra. “We would put two people in arm chairs on either side, immobile, watching the audience, have people take bows who weren’t in the concert. Later, we had a streaker in a bikini flash across the stage.”

The success was immediate, if not initially highly profitable.

“Even after the success of the concert, I had no idea it would turn into a career. I was asked how long I thought this might go, and I said ‘maybe five years.’

“The first three times I toured I lost money,” Schickele says ruefully. “It took a while to iron out the wrinkles.”

The first tour brought Schickele and the Royal P.D.Q. Bach Festival Orchestra to Hollywood Bowl in July, 1966. Mester conducted--in his first, and, astonishingly, only appearance at the Bowl--but under the pseudonym Bruno Pantoffel, for fear that association with such an event might hurt his serious career.

Now, of course, he is quite proud of his long connection to the inglorious P.D.Q. “I told members of the board they’re going to see something they’ve never seen before,” Mester says of the concert Monday with his orchestra. “That’s all I want to say now,” he adds archly.

Schickele has not always been certain about including his odder creations and discoveries in the official canon. His first gig as a composer was actually a year spent in Los Angeles city schools, on a Ford Foundation grant in 1960.

“On the application, I wondered, ‘Shall I submit just the ‘official’ catalogue, or everything, including the pieces like “Lewdus Tonalis” (with its text drawn from bathroom graffiti)?’ I did put it all down, and on my assignment I found the words ‘You and L.A. will love each other.’ ”

Although Schickele keeps P.D.Q. and the Professor--who confusingly also composes, including such pieces as the “Unbegun” Symphony (third and fourth movements only)--distinct on stage, he has little doubts in his own mind about the essential unity of all his music.

“There never has been as much of a division between P.D.Q. Bach and my serious stuff in my mind as there is in others’. The ‘Abduction of Figaro,’ for my tastes, has some of my best stuff.” (The full-length opera is available on videocassette, and sold out 28 performances in Stockholm last year.)

“I work just as hard on my P.D.Q. Bach discoveries as I do on my serious pieces, and I can be working on one of each simultaneously without any schizophrenic problems. I don’t drink a potion or anything.”

A sampling of Schickele’s serious music can be heard Tuesday, when the Armadillo String Quartet presents Schickele’s three string quartets, plus “Music for an Evening” for string quartet and piano four-hands, in the Little Theater on the Brentwood campus of Mount St. Mary’s College.

Barry Socher, first violinist of the ensemble, has noted the unifying elements in Schickele’s music.

“We were talking about how we had a hard time using the word serious about this music. There are a lot of lighthearted, popular elements--rock, jazz, hoedown-type music, bird calls--in it. A lot like P.D.Q. Bach, in fact, without the slapstick,” he says.

The composer will play one of the piano parts in “Music for an Evening” and introduce the works.

“When I am a composer-in-residence at colleges or chamber music festivals, I like to introduce my serious music verbally, although the manner is somewhat different from the Professor,” Schickele says.

“There are a lot of people who are not only surprised I write serious music, but also disappointed, like ‘Here’s another clown who wants to play Hamlet,’ ” he notes.

“It would be ungrateful to be too resentful. I always like doing P.D.Q. Bach, and I’ve been making a very nice living doing something I love doing. I’ve made my bed, and it’s not a bad bed.

“But there is some typecasting involved. I took my kids once to a revival screening of ‘Silent Running’ in which Joan Baez sings two of my songs. At the end, when the credits came up and it said ‘Music by Peter Schickele,’ we could hear everybody saying ‘What? Noooo, really?’

“ ‘Silent Running’ wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been doing P.D.Q. Bach,” Schickele acknowledges. His first P.D.Q. album came out quickly after the Town Hall public debut in 1965, on Vanguard. His ability to parody various music styles was noticed by producer Maynard Solomon, and Schickele was asked to arrange Joan Baez’s “Noel” album, putting Christmas carols into the style of the period in which they were written. This led to several other recordings with Baez, including composing the original music for “Baptism.”

“The collaboration with Joan Baez was one of the happiest I had,” Schickele recalls. It was those albums that brought him to the attention of Douglas Trumbull, director of “Silent Running.”

“There are lots of special people floating around,” Baez says, “but few that talented. We did some ghastly rock ‘n’ roll album, which we canned, but I like what we released. I saw his show again a few years ago. I couldn’t believe he was still doing it, but it’s irreplaceable, you know.”

Schickele also can’t envision life completely without P.D.Q. “It’s in my bones,” he explains. Besides, “There are other genres he must have sullied. I plan to continue working on P.D.Q. recordings. I also plan to continue the annual concerts at Carnegie Hall.”

Some of his new pieces, such as the “Safe Sextette,” will be on the Pasadena program tomorrow, which will be completely different from the one he gave in January with the Philharmonic. “ I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes with some surprises,” he adds enigmatically.

Schickele says that, ironically, a regular subscription audience is a better crowd for P.D.Q. rather than a pops audience, because they get more of the jokes. But everyone should be able to get some of it.

“I try to have a bunch of different things going on in each piece, not expecting everybody to get everything. I always make sure to include enough Stephen Foster, Beethoven’s ‘Fifth,’ etc. that everybody is going to recognize something.”

Mester agrees. “There are enough corny puns and pratfalls, so if you don’t get the subtle stuff, you still go out laughing--and there are incredibly sophisticated things going on as well.”

That is one of the aspects to P.D.Q Bach that endears him to the classical musicians who must re-create the lunacy. “I’ve been a big fan of the P.D.Q.

“The idea that classical musicians are dry and humorless is pure myth,” Schickele asserts. “I never hit an orchestra without coming away with some new jokes.”

He is very solicitous of the feelings of all involved in the madness. “Anything I ask them to do, they’re doing me a favor. I drop the pieces that nobody volunteers for.”

That is seldom a problem, Mester says. “All musicians everywhere love to do it, because they understand how funny, sophisticated and affectionate it is--like Peter is!”