Properly Neglected

The audience in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall was select -- largely musicians, musicologists, music teachers and students. They were gathered to hear the neglected music of P.D.Q. Bach, the least-known offspring of Johann Sebastian. The opening Concerto for Horn and Hardart got off to a lively start when blaaaaaaat! It was Soloist Peter Schickele blowing on a duck caller attached to the "concert grand Hard-art," a four-wheel, coin-operated contraption that looked like a junkyard reject. As the music went sailing off in directions unknown, Schickele merrily blasted away on a kazoo, ocarina, bike horns, buzzers and doorbells. For a finale, he punctured six balloons with an ice pick and a rifle.

P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742) is the happy creation of Schickele, a composer and former teacher. The concert was a sometimes broad but always knowing lampoon of baroque music, carried off with just enough expertise to border on the believable. Some of the musical jokes, excellently played by a 20-piece orchestra of professional musicians, only a musician would understand. Others, such as the Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons, any listener could enjoy. Treading on every musical cliche, fugues began and went nowhere, arias seesawed off and on key, and when a climax was needed, Schickele chimed in with a hoot from a Seven-Up bottle.

Schickele explains solemnly that he first stumbled on P.D.Q., whose existence was known only "from police records and tavern lOUs," while touring a Bavarian castle in 1953. To his amazement, he says, he found the care taker using a piece of manuscript as a strainer for his percolator. It turned out to be the Sanka cantata.

Other unearthed P.D.Q. favorites, including the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, have since been collected on a Vanguard recording. Perhaps the most touching compliment Schickele received was from a lady who rushed up to him after one concert, shook his hand warmly and gushed: "Oh, professor, it was awful, just awful!" "Thank you," said Schickele, "thank you."

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