 | Peter Schickele Radio Interview
(posted
December 20, 2003)
Peter Schickele is scheduled to be a guest on the WNYC radio program Soundcheck
this Monday, December 22, 2003, at 2:00 p.m. Soundcheck host
John Schaefer will very likely ask Mr. Schickele, or even Prof. Schickele,
about the upcoming P.D.Q. Bach concerts in New York City, as well as about
Mr. Schickele’s own music. If you’re already in the greater
New York City area at that time, you can listen in on WNYC-FM at 93.9 on
your radio dial. If you’re not there at that time, you can listen in
over the Internet at http://www.wnyc.org/music/.
If that time has already passed, WNYC usually posts archives of these
broadcasts a few days later, and they might very well do the same thing with
this one. Or if that time isn’t here yet, you can revisit WNYC’s
archive of last
year’s Soundcheck appearance while you’re waiting. That
time again: 2:00 p.m., December 22, 2003.
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| New CD’s, Concerts, and Schickele Mixes
(posted December 9, 2003)
Last year there was an announcement in this
space about the world premiere of Peter Schickele’s chamber music piece
for children, The Emperor’s New Clothes. That premiere went so
well that immediately thereafter the musicians (An die Musik) and narrator (Pe ter Schickele) were
rushed into a recording studio so that now a year later this charming new
adaptation of the classic children’s story could be released on CD and announced in this very same space. The
recording is part of An die Musik’s
series Timeless Tales and Music of Our Time, and you can read more
about it and even hear audio clips at Ye
Old Schickele Shoppe.
You can also read more about and hear audio clips from the Joan
Baez album Baptism, which
consists of poetry sung and spoken to Peter Schickele’s original music.
That’s the last in a trio of Joan Baez/Peter Schickele collaborations
which Vanguard Records has been reissuing in shiny new packages digitally remastered
from the original tapes. For Baptism—Original
Master Series you can even hear the audio clips from the three bonus
tracks, never-before-released cuts from the original recording sessions
containing poems by William Blake, James Joyce, and Henry Treece. New liner notes by
historian Arthur Levy put this album in historical perspective, along with
the other two Joan Baez/Peter Schickele collaborations, Noël,
and Joan, which as a trio he
calls “one of those once-in-a-lifetime synergies that
worked.”
Another recording being reissued in a new form is the Audiobook edition of The
Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach. Although the CD’s and
cassettes of this Grammy-nominated recording still remain as out-of-print as
ever, an alert Web site visitor has pointed out that the audiobook is now
available for downloading from audible.com and iTunes. So you can’t
buy it on CD, but you can download it and burn it on CD yourself; I
mean, if you have to do that much work yourself, why not just read the
original paperback book? But as
a service to those who missed buying the CD or cassette, or who just like
downloading audio, we’re now including instructions
for downloading on the Definitive
Audiobook page.
Another alert visitor wrote in with the answer to the question posed in
the Peter Schickele Scrapbook last month: who is the mystery photographer
of the “Fragile” picture? The answer turns out to be one of the
members of the Armadillo String Quartet, the hosters of the annual “Music
of Peter Schickele” concerts in Los Angeles. This startling
revelation also prompted updating the Concert
Schedule Page to announce that this year’s “Music of Peter
Schickele” concert will take place on April 19th, at Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in downtown
Los Angeles. So if you were planning on checking out the new Walt Disney Concert Hall
which has been so much in the news lately, be sure to walk across the street
and visit Zipper Hall and the Armadillo
String Quartet on April 19th too. Or in case you aren’t
going to be in Los Angeles in April, we’ve also added new listings for all
of the other Peter Schickele concerts through May of 2004, including special
event concerts with The Chamber
Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York and Orchestra
2001 in Philadelphia, as well as recently scheduled concerts in Omaha,
Nebraska, and the one in Chicago,
Illinois which many different alert visitors have been asking about. Or
in case you aren’t going to be in any of those cities, we’ve included
updated listings for the upcoming
Schickele Mix broadcasts, through March of 2004, and also another
mention of the previously mentioned new
CD’s.
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| Peter Schickele Scrapbook, P.D.Q. Bach
Lyrics, and More
(posted November 2, 2003)
Two new features have been added to this Web site, one informative and
the other entertaining. The second of them is a
kind of audio visual photo album/art gallery/listening
booth/page-with-a-bunch-of-stuff-on-it called The
Peter Schickele Scrapbook. As miscellaneous as its name
implies, this new page contains some artwork related to Mr. Schickele,
various photographs of Mr. Schickele in various places, and various audio
files, including, for the first time ever, a streaming audio recording of a
complete Peter Schickele composition not available anywhere else except in The
Peter Schickele Scrapbook.
Also new to this Web site are some pages with lyrics to P.D.Q. Bach
compositions. This is in response to numerous inquiries received from
people who had a hard time understanding such lyrics when hearing them in
concert or on recordings. We’ve collected together those lyrics for
those P.D.Q. Bach pieces which had received the most inquiries, or which
were hardest to understand, or which were easiest to find, and put them on
the P.D.Q. Bach lyrics pages in a
stylish presentation that’s, if not suitable for framing, at least easier to understand.
Then on one of the old pages we’ve added some new information about Mr.
Schickele’s appearance on the radio program From
The Top. Frequent readers of these news items are already
aware that the live taping of this radio program can be attended by going to
Troy, New York this coming Friday, November 7, 2003. But those of you
who aren’t going to Troy this weekend and prefer just listening to radio
programs on the radio may be interested in learning that the program will be
broadcast on public radio stations starting the week of January 19, 2004. If so, some
suggestions on how to find a broadcast in your area or on the internet can
be found on the newly updated Concert Schedule
Page.
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| P. D. Q. in San Fran and Schickele Mix in
December
(posted August 23, 2003)
Last year began a new trend of having the annual New York City
December P. D. Q. Bach concerts in additional places other than New York
City, starting with a New York concert in Philadelphia. This year
that trend continued, with previously-announced New York concerts
scheduled for New Jersey, and even Utah. And now that trend has
started to spiral out of control, with a new addition to the
concert calendar which makes the New
York concerts truly an event that reaches to the entire other side of
the country: a December 12th concert in San Francisco, California.
This concert contains the same
works as the other New York concerts, including Variations on an
Unusually Simple-Minded Theme and the “Safe” Sextet, but
whereas the New York Pick-up Ensemble was willing to pick up and take
their act on the road to New Jersey, they aren’t able to take it on an
airplane to California, so Prof. Schickele has managed to find a local
band to fill in for them—some of you may have even heard of the San
Francisco Symphony, which will be conducted by Edwin Outwater, although
the singers will still include Michèle Eaton and David Düsing,
and the other singer will still be Prof. Peter Schickele, as will be the
piano soloist and host for the evening. While you’re visiting
San Francisco in December, you can still listen to Schickele Mix,
at least if you’re in a part of San Francisco that can pick up the
broadcasts on KRCB (Sundays at 4:00). And if you’re wondering
which episode of Schickele Mix will be broadcast that weekend,
the Schickele Mix
Program Sequences page now lists all of the programs through almost
the end of December. There are programs on clarinets, tangos, and
transitions, all leading up to the aforementioned almost end of December
when, appropriately, some of the classic Christmas programs will be
broadcast. Now San Franciscites can use the
Program Sequences
page to plan their Fall listening schedule. Actually, you can
listen to these radio broadcasts even if you aren’t in San Francisco (if
all else fails, you can still find an Internet broadcast at
http://www.publicradiofan.com),
just like you can attend the
annual New York P. D. Q. Bach concerts even if you aren’t in New
York.
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| Golden Anniversary Crossword Puzzle
(posted
August 2, 2003)
A new crossword puzzle has been added
to the Peter Schickele Web Site, and this one is very timely, as it
celebrates a Golden Anniversary. Yes, this month, August of 2003, is
the anniversary of an event so significant (at least to the
nostalgia-minded among us), so momentous (in an historical trivia sort of
way), so downright important (at least to its small circle of friends),
that it actually inspired the creation of a
crossword puzzle about it! If you already know what happened in
that August of bygone lore, then you will already have a head start in
solving this puzzle (either the interactive
version or the printable version). If you don’t
know now, you’ll get to see some relevant historical information when you are done solving
it.
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| CD and Poster Now Available
(posted
July 16, 2003)
Last December we announced
that Vanguard Records was gradually reissuing its entire series of Joan
Baez recordings with digitally remastered sound, additional tracks, and
new liner notes, starting with Noël,
a collection of Christmas carols arranged by Peter Schickele. Last
month this project reached the eighth Joan Baez album, and the second one
arranged by Mr. Schickele. Joan, as the 1967 album and Ms.
Baez are both called, contained arrangements of popular songs by popular
song-writers including Lennon & McCartney, Paul Simon, Tim Hardin, and
Richard Fariña. This 2003 reissue
contains, in addition to
the remastered sound, two new tracks, including Mr. Schickele’s arrangement of
Autumn Leaves from the original Joan recording sessions.
New liner notes by historian Arthur Levy provide an inside look at the
making of the recording and the burgeoning short-lived trend of folk singers
recording with
classical orchestras.
Also of historical interest is the
original poster promoting the Schickele Mix radio program.
This poster, incorporating the Periodic Table of Musics, was originally offered by Public Radio International to
Schickele Mix listeners who wanted to be able to look at Schickele
Mix and not just listen to it, but for many years the poster has been
unavailable an account of there weren’t any left. But recently an
alert PRI employee stumbled upon an entire bunch of these posters, which
had lain hidden unsuspected somewhere in the PRI offices. The entire
bunch has now wound its way to our own lavish warehouse facilities in
Swanton, VT, and are being offered for sale by our own
Ye Olde Schickele Poster Shoppe.
And these babies are bargain priced, available at the same price as the
much smaller posters that were already being sold there, and also included
in a money-saving package
with all of those other posters. You can see a picture of and get
more information about this old poster
or the new Joan CD at Ye
Old Schickele Shoppe.
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| 2003-2004 Concert Season Announced
(posted
June 24, 2003)
Several eager Web site visitors have asked about the upcoming annual
December New York P.D.Q. Bach concerts, wanting to know when, and in some
cases, where they will be this time around. Even fewer people have asked about the
concerts on the road the following year. So even though we don’t
usually post this information until we’re sure it’s correct (usually about
September or so), as a public service to that part of the public which
will be served by this information, we’ve fearlessly posted all of the
upcoming 2003-2004 season concerts so far on the
Concert Schedule Page.
Here’s a brief overview: the annual December New York concerts
are December 26 and 27 at Lincoln Center in New York, December 28 at NJPAC
in Newark, New Jersey (a suburb of New York City), and December 18th
through 20th in Utah (conveniently located nowhere near New York).
They are called P.D.Q. Bach Strikes Back,
and feature Variations on an Unusually Simple-Minded Theme and a
newly-discovered orchestral version of the Twelve Quite Heavenly Songs. The 2004 season contains the world premiere of Peter Schickele’s own clarinet concerto in January,
many different performances of P.D.Q. Bach and Peter Schickele: the Jekyll
and
Hyde Tour across the country during February through April, and a couple
of miscellaneous concerts that feature some Schickele classics here and
there, now and then.
Of course, the downside of posting this information so far in advance
is that many of the listed links to concert halls where you can buy
tickets are actually links to concert halls that are not yet selling
tickets. But at least you can plan now and start camping out in
front of the theater even if you can’t buy the tickets until the fall, or
whenever it turns out to be.
One other downside of posting information too soon is that often new
details surface which have to be added later. For example, earlier
this month we listed the concert in
Woodstock which includes Mr. Schickele narrating Stravinsky’s
L’Histoire du Soldat plus a performance of Mr. Schickele’s Knight
of the Burning Pestle, and now the listing has to be updated with more
details because it turns out that this concert is a special 100th
anniversary concert for the Woodstock Guild, and as befits the occasion
they have assembled a stellar cast of performers, including not just
musicians, but dancers and actors, to make this into a rarely seen full
stage production.
This updated listing now contains an entire page of information containing
the cast list, program
notes on both pieces, and a message from the producer. Now there is no
other Web site around which includes this much information on this
Woodstock Beat concert, or on P.D.Q. Bach Strikes Back,
or on, in fact, the
entire 2003-2004 Schickele season.
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| Guest at Live Tapings of Radio Shows
(posted
June 2, 2003)
Peter Schickele’s appearances on the radio are not limited to
Schickele Mix. Recently, two different radio programs invited Peter Schickele to be a guest
on their shows, and both of these programs will be taped in front of live audiences. One of these programs is hosted by Christopher
O’Riley, last seen on these pages as the famous concert pianist on P.D.Q. Bach’s The Short-Tempered
Clavier. As part of his recovery program from playing the
largest ever P.D.Q. Bach keyboard work (from memory, no less), Mr. O’Riley
has been presenting the performances of young musicians on From The Top,
the Public Radio International series broadcast weekly on many fine public
radio stations. This Fall, his two worlds will collide as Peter
Schickele, the man who discovered The Short-Tempered Clavier in the
first place,
will be Mr. O’Riley’s special guest on an upcoming episode of From The
Top. The performance will be recorded before a live audience in
Troy, New York on November 7th, 2003, and broadcast over many public radio
stations starting on December 22nd, 2003.
Another program which is recorded on Fridays and broadcast on public
radio stations shortly thereafter is, uh—Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!—yeah,
that’s it. This NPR news quiz show is usually recorded on Friday
mornings in a Chicago
studio, but a special series of live tapings is taking place on various
Thursday evenings in various
cities that were among the first to air the program, including, amazingly
enough, a program in Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Power Center on June 26, 2003, the day right
before the Peter Schickele Meets P.D.Q. Bach concert in the very
same theater (yes, the Power Center is a theater). This
serendipitous convergence prompted the Wait, Wait gang to invite
Mr. Schickele to be a guest on their show, I mean, since he was going to
be there anyway.
To attend either of these radio program tapings in person,
follow the links on the Concert Schedule Page
to the proper ticket buying information. If you can’t attend them,
catch the broadcasts on public radio shortly thereafter. If your local
public radio stations don’t carry From The Top or Wait, Wait,
Don’t Tell Me!, you could look for a public radio station which does
and also broadcasts over the Internet. A good resource for finding
such Internet broadcasts is
http://www.publicradiofan.com. (This also happens to be a good
way of finding Schickele Mix broadcasts.)
Between those two radio programs, Mr. Schickele will also be a guest at
a concert which is not being broadcast over the radio. Woodstock
Percussion has invited Mr. Schickele to narrate one of his favorite works,
Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale).
To round out the concert, they’ve also scheduled one of Mr. Schickele’s
own works: The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The place
is Brydcliffe Theater in Woodstock, New York, and there is a choice of
dates and times between July 18th and July 20th. Details of this concert, the
two radio programs, and the previously mentioned Ann Arbor concert, are
all listed on the Concert Schedule Page,
along with two concerts from May that have already passed but haven’t yet
been removed from the page. (Concerts after that, including the
annual December concerts in New York, will be announced in September, if
not sooner.)
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| New Recording of Serenade for Three and
Other Products Not Quite As New
(posted
May 9, 2003)
The Chicago-based Orion Ensemble has just released a new recording of
chamber music, including Peter Schickele’s Serenade for Three.
This is the piece for clarinet, violin, and piano which crosses crossover
boundaries by including a
set of Peter Schickele variations on a theme by P.D.Q. Bach. This
sparkling new CD is already hard to find—“not available in many
stores”—but the Orion Ensemble has given us permission to sell it right
here at Ye Olde Schickele Shoppe.
We have also included sample audio clips from this CD so that you can compare
it against the previous recording of Serenade for Three before
buying. Or if you’re trying to complete your collection of Peter
Schickele recordings, you can always get both of them and do the comparison
on your own reliable stereo system.
And for those trying to complete your collection of Peter Schickele
recordings, you are probably aware that there are recordings that are even harder to
find than the new Orion Ensemble Serenade for Three. And so
you’ve probably been thinking that it would be very helpful to know what you’re looking
for. Even though we can’t always find the recordings themselves, now there
is (at last!) a list, at least, of long lost Peter
Schickele recordings. With the Hard
To Find Recordings Page, you have a handy roadmap on your arduous trek
in search of missing records.
Similarly, this Web site also now contains a Hard
To Find Books Page, which does for books what the Hard To Find
Recordings Page does for recordings, kind of just like you might
expect. But one book that you won’t find on the Hard To Find Page is
The Lexicon of Musical Invective,
that intriguing compendium of bad reviews of good music (or vice versa,
depending on what you like). The reason it isn’t on that page is not
because it was written by Nicolas Slonimsky—in fact, this edition contains
a new Foreword by Peter Schickele—but because it’s not
hard-to-find; you can find it right here at Ye
Olde Schickele Shoppe, and even pick up a copy of it while you’re
ordering the new Orion Ensemble CD. This edition with the new foreword
was actually published a few years ago, but for some reason we are only now
getting around to selling copies of it.
For some other reason, we are also only now getting around to selling
copies of the Where The Wild Things Are
and Other Maurice Sendak Stories DVD. We had announced
back in December that the classic animated version of Where The Wild
Things Are (with the Peter Schickele score and narration), available on
a videotape with other Maurice Sendak works such as In The Night Kitchen
(with Peter Schickele narration), was being repackaged and also being made
available on DVD for the first time. Now all of the details have been
worked out so that if you didn’t get tired of waiting for us and buy it
somewhere else, now you can buy it at Ye
Old Schickele Shoppe while you’re picking up a good book and that
oft-mentioned brand-new Orion Ensemble CD.
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| Summer Schickele Mix and Concert Schedule
Announced
(posted April 21, 2003)
When P.D.Q. Bach wrote the lyrics “autumn is over and winter is
gone; pardon me please, my good friends, if I yawn; ev’ryone
acts as if spring were some big deal...” he might well have followed it by
“it’s the summer concert schedule I want to know about.” Why he
didn’t do this is a question left to those who will analyze his score for Four
Curmudgeonly Canons in more detail, but you can bet it’s due to some
musical technicality like “it doesn’t rhyme” or “it doesn’t have
anything to do with the rest of the piece” and not because the summer
concert schedule only rarely includes P.D.Q. Bach concerts, the usual
touring season being January through May. But in fact, there is only
one concert scheduled for the upcoming summer season, a performance of Peter
Schickele Meets P.D.Q. Bach with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra on June 27th,
at, in an amazing but irrelevant coincidence, this Web site’s webmeister’s own alma mater, the University of Michigan. So if you are not going to be in A2 for the Ann
Arbor Summer Festival, you’re off the hook, P.D.Q. Bach concert-wise,
until this December.
The summer schedule of Schickele Mix programs is much more
comprehensive, with a different program scheduled to be broadcast every week
of the season. The complete list is now available on the Schickele
Mix Program Sequences page. This season contains a good
selection of past programs, including several programs on waltzes and
conductors (on separate programs, of course; not waltzing conductors),
but perhaps the highlight of the season, for those interested in Mr.
Schickele’s work before Schickele Mix, will be the two programs on
music which composers wrote when they were very young, including First
Things First, which included the original premiere radio broadcast of
P.D.Q. Bach’s Sanka Cantata, recorded back when Prof. Schickele was
still young enough not to know better.
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| March Premieres in March
(posted
March 7, 2003)
A short march written by Peter Schickele a couple of years ago will make
its premiere this year in March. The composition, Finish Line at
the Rat Race, was written for Les Misérables Brass Band (you may
remember Les Misérables Brass Band from Schickele
Mix program number 19,
which was broadcast on the radio a few weeks ago) to use as part of The
March Project, a large collection of small marches from many different
composers. Les Misérables Brass Band has spent the last couple of years collecting
these short marches and finally has enough of them to present The March
Project at Symphony Space in
New York City (you may remember Symphony Space from Selected Shorts,
which is broadcast on the radio every week). Mr. Schickele will
be there too, and may even say a few words of introduction. The time
of march is 8:30 p.m., one week from today, March 14, 2003.
This concert has been added to the Concert Listing page,
and just in time, too.
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| More Concerts and Schickele Mix Spring
Schedule Announced
(posted February 28, 2003)
Is there a Fugue in your future? There is if you listen to Schickele
Mix program number 55, the one that not only asks this question but
answers it too. This program will be broadcast the week of April 23rd,
but don’t take my word for it—check the Schickele
Mix Program Sequences page, which has recently been updated to
include the programs scheduled to be broadcast in the Spring of 2003.
On this page you can find out about not only this fine fugue program but two other programs on
fugues and nine more programs that are, alas, free of fugues, but instead
are about other important musical topics such as yodeling and bassoons.
Meanwhile, two more concerts have been added to the Concert
Listing page, and they are coming up pretty quickly. The first one
of these to hit the concert halls is a presentation of P.D.Q. Bach &
Peter Schickele: The Jekyll and Hyde Tour in none other than
Akron, Ohio on March 15th, 2003. This concert will be held at the E.
J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall, which is on the University of Akron
campus and not to be confused with B. J. Thomas, who not only isn’t a
concert hall but isn’t in Akron; he’ll be in Rochester, Washington
that day. The other recently added Peter Schickele concert is on April
2nd, 2003. It’s a gala benefit
concert for Chicago Chamber Musicians and will include music by Prof.
Schickele, Mr. Schickele, P.D.Q. Bach, and Mozart, but no B. J. Thomas
fugues.
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|
New Concerts Announced
(posted February 5, 2003)
Even whilst the 2002-2003 Concert Season is already underway and Peter
Schickele is already traveling to Wisconsin and Florida, new concerts are
being added to the schedule and new travel arrangements are being
made. Now the travel arrangements include flying to Los Angeles,
riding on a ship around Manhattan and staying in one place for a three-day
residency at Eastern Michigan University. The Los Angeles event is the
annual “Music of Peter Schickele” concert, which
the Armadillo String Quartet has been presenting since 1991 and which this
year will take place on March 5th. The EMU Music
Now Fest will include a full schedule of lectures, open rehearsals,
and concerts featuring Mr. Schickele’s music during the last three days in
February. The ship is the World Yacht, home to a gala
benefit concert on May 17th featuring music of P.D.Q. Bach and Peter
Schickele performed by Mr. Schickele, Michèle Eaton, and David Düsing, who
have taken their act to the water to support Music For All Seasons.
But if hearing P.D.Q. Bach on the water makes you seasick, you can stay on
dry land in Manhattan and hear Mr. Schickele’s Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and
Piano on May 15th. All of these events are now listed on the Concert
Listing page, along with all of the previously listed concerts, already
in progress.
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Radio Interviews Available On The Web
(posted
January 5, 2003)
The new year has pointed out that sometimes Peter Schickele can be heard
on the radio in programs that are completely unrelated to Schickele Mix.
On New Year’s Day, he was the guest on the WNYC radio program Soundcheck.
During the hour-long interview, he told John Schaefer about the recent
P.D.Q. Bach concerts in New York City, even giving a complete description of
the newest work on the program, a violin sextet. A few days before
that, WNYC rebroadcast Mr. Schickele’s June 2002 appearance on Survival
Kit. And speaking of the recent P.D.Q. Bach concerts in New York
City, the other new work on that program was P.D.Q. Bach’s Two and a Half Variations on “In Dulci
Jubilo,” which was first heard on A Prairie Home Companion.
In case you missed any of these broadcasts, you’ll be glad to hear that
all of them have been archived on the Web and can be heard online. Our
radio broadcast page has now been
expanded to include descriptions
of these broadcasts and links to the sites where the archives can be
found.
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