P. D. Q. Bach
fictitious composer invented by musical satirist Peter Schickele
P.D.Q. Bach is a fictional composer created by the American composer and musical satirist Peter Schickele for a five-decade career performing the "discovered" works of the "only forgotten son" of the Bach family. Schickele's music combines parodies of musicological scholarship, the conventions of Baroque and Classical music, and slapstick comedy. The name P.D.Q. is a parody of the three-part names given to some members of the Bach family that are commonly reduced to initials, such as C.P.E. for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; PDQ is an initialism for "pretty damned quick".
Schickele began working on the character while studying at the Aspen Music Festival and School and Juilliard, and performed a variety of P.D.Q. Bach shows over many years. The Village Voice mentions the juxtaposition of collage, bitonality, musical satire, and orchestral surrealism in a "bizarre melodic stream of consciousness ... In P.D.Q. Bach he has single-handedly mapped a musical universe that everyone knew was there and no one else had the guts (not simply the bad taste) to explore."
In 2012, Schickele reduced his touring due to age. On December 28 and 29, 2015, at The Town Hall in New York, he performed two concerts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first concert. Schickele died on January 16, 2024, aged 88.
Biography
Schickele wrote a humorous fictional biography of the composer according to which P.D.Q. Bach was born in Leipzig on April 1, 1742, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach; the twenty-first of Johann Sebastian's twenty children. He is also referred to as "the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian's 20-odd children".
The public source identifies “P. D. Q. Bach” as fictitious composer invented by musical satirist Peter Schickele. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bach, fictitious and composer.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1190508. VIAF identifies the subject as 265810019. The Library of Congress control number is no2012121996. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2015, 2024 and 1742.
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This entry incorporates text from “P. D. Q. Bach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.