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A live interview with Peter Schickele will be broadcast in the New York City area and over the internet on WNYC’s Soundcheck with John Schaefer on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007. The show runs from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., and Mr. Schickele is scheduled for the second segment of the show, where he will be able to talk about the new CD and his upcoming December 16th concert with the Westchester Philharmonic in Purchase, New York. The link for listening over the internet is http://www.wnyc.org/ and the link for listening over the New York air waves is 93.9 FM. They even may be able to play selections from the new CD on the show.
Another radio program that even may play selections from the new CD is NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday on December 9th. Their Senior Producer and Music Director Ned Wharton is going to announce his picks for a seasonal CD gift guide during the Director’s Cuts segment, and we have good reason to suspect that maybe one of his picks for a possible recommended CD perhaps just might be—oh, alright, they told us—will be P.D.Q. Bach & Peter Schickele: The Jekyll & Hyde Tour. Check local listings for your local NPR broadcast of Weekend Edition Sunday or try out that WNYC link at http://www.wnyc.org/ sometime between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. on December 9th, 2007.
Another way that the latest P.D.Q. Bach CD is infiltrating the internet is a new behind-the-scenes video that Telarc put together and posted on YouTube. Details about and the direct link to the video can be found on the P.D.Q. Bach & Peter Schickele: The Jekyll & Hyde Tour page.
And speaking of the December 16th Westchester Philharmonic concert—yes we were, back up in the first paragraph—these home page announcements have been remiss in not pointing out sooner that the 2007-2008 concert season has been posted on the concert schedule page. This is particularly bothersome when you consider that the other concert taking place in December occurs tonight, so if you’re going to get to Woodstock, New York in time for that, you’ll need to start driving right away. But be sure to read the rest of the Winter 2008 season for some concerts that you really can get to on time.
The release date for CD 7 is almost here! On November 13, 2007, the long-awaited seventh and most recent P.D.Q. Bach CD on Telarc will become available around the country. Many eager fans are already lining up at CD stores to pick up their copies of P.D.Q. Bach and Peter Schickele: The Jekyll & Hyde Tour as soon as they go on sale at midnight.
P.D.Q. Bach and Peter Schickele: The Jekyll & Hyde Tour picks up the story right where it left off in CD 6 (P.D.Q. Bach And The Short-Tempered Clavier). Prof. Schickele has returned for another year at Hoople’s school of music and musicolology to finally uncover the mystery of the most misunderstood composer of all time, He-Whose-Music-Must-Not-Be-Played. This time the psychic connection between Bach and Schickele threatens to corrupt Schickele’s own music as well. Will the forces of enlightenment win out? Is Prof. S. working for good or evil? Find out on November 13th in The Jekyll & Hyde Tour CD.
To get this CD as soon as possible, see if you can find a local music store that is holding a “Midnight Music” party and stay up late the evening of November 12th until the CD becomes available at the witching hour. Or if all of your local music stores have more sense than that, preorder it right now right from this very Web site. That way the new CD will be shipped on November 13th, the exact moment that it becomes available, and will show up in your mailbox a safe length of time thereafter.
And while you are waiting for the new CD to arrive, you can get a taste of the adventures to come by listening to these never-before-released audio excerpts from the CD. Spoiler Alert! Although widely reported that two major characters die during the storyline of The Jekyll & Hyde Tour, if you don’t want to know about the fate of King Louis XVI before listening to the CD, do not listen to these sample audio clips.
As faithful followers of this space are aware, Mr. Schickele’s usual touring season runs from January through May, and sometimes spills over into December and June. However, occasional concerts outside of these dates are not unheard of, so you might have heard of Mr. Schickele’s upcoming residency at the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival at the end of August. This festival, created by Jon Kimura Parker (as seen and even heard on the Two Pianos Are Better Than One CD), includes two weeks of chamber music concerts, the last week of which has a concert including rarely heard Schickele pieces every night of the week. If you attend all of these concerts, you can hear Mr. Schickele narrating Three Strange Cases (his setting of Ogden Nash poems) and The Emperor’s New Clothes (his adaptation of the classic children’s tale), plus hear performances of Morning Music for piano four hands, several other short Schickele pieces, and finally the world premiere of Music for Orcas Island, for piano, violin, viola and cello, written to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Festival.
The festival is very out-of-the-way—Orcas Island is part of the San Juan Islands off the coast of northern Washington state—but that works out fine for a concert series that takes place during the summer holidays. The concerts take place every day from August 26th through September 1st, so stay for the whole week, or check the details on the updated concert schedule page to choose which concert to attend. You can even do some whale watching while taking the ferry to the island.
Or for people who are not spending August traveling across the country and beyond, but instead are spending their vacation at home listening to the radio, this month WITF will be rebroadcasting their edition of Composing Thoughts, where Mr. Schickele spent an hour talking to host John Clare in depth about various composition- and Pennsylvania-related topics. If you missed the original broadcast last May, here’s another chance to listen in over the Web at http://azulweb.streamguys.com/witf/witf.asx. The program will be broadcast on WITF at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, August 12th. More details about the program can be found at http://composingthoughts.blogspot.com/ including the most complete detail of all: a downloadable podcast of the program.
Public Radio International is going to discontinue distributing Schickele Mix programs to public radio stations on July 1, 2007. This will mark the end of an era, as many listeners across the country have been informed, enlightened, and entertained by Peter Schickele’s musical explorations across numerous musical styles and forms for the past 15 years. The funding for producing new programs actually ran out in the late 1990’s, but PRI continued making repeat broadcasts of the program available to reach new audiences for many years. With only a limited number of programs available for repeat broadcasts, many public radio stations stopped airing Schickele Mix after many of the programs had been repeated more than five times. Although there were still some radio stations and listeners hearing Schickele Mix for the first time, PRI has been distributing the program for about as long as it possibly could without funding being available.
Unfortunately, it is still not possible to produce CD’s or podcasts of Schickele Mix due to the large amounts of copyrighted music used on the program. It would require being able to hire a full time person just to track down and negotiate the rights to use the music for these purposes. This Web site will continue to make available the searchable database of program playlists listing all of the music presented on the program, for historical and nostalgic purposes, but it is not possible to include the programs themselves.
Thank you for listening to Schickele Mix all of these years. You’re looking good.
We have just received word that tomorrow Peter Schickele is going to be a guest on WITF’s radio program Composing Thoughts, where he will spend an hour talking to host John Clare about various composition- and Pennsylvania-related topics. Some people may remember John Clare from when he hosted 20/20 Hearing out of Nevada a few years ago, and others can find out more about his new program and even newer Peter Schickele interview at http://composingthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/05/schickele.html and then listen in to the broadcast Sunday, May 13th at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time by going to http://azulweb.streamguys.com/witf/witf.asx.
We have also just received word that P.D.Q. Bach’s publisher, Theodore Presser Company is marking the composer’s 200th anniversary year with a new feature on their Web site, “The Dubious Works of P.D.Q. Bach,” containing some background information on the history of publishing P.D.Q. Bach’s music along with a complete list of that music which is available for purchase, presented on two different order forms: one for ordering right on-line, and one for printing out, which saves time by already containing authentic coffee cup stains. This is the first time that it has been so easy to find all of P.D.Q. Bach’s published sheet music in one place, and one can only wonder why it has taken 200 years for this to happen, or one can both wonder why and go to http://www.presser.com/marketing/spotlite/pdqbach/pdq.htm to see for oneself.
The latest new addition to the concert schedule is a real exciting event, both for people near Owings Mills, Maryland and for people who have been clamoring for a new P.D.Q. Bach CD for many years. Not only does the concert include most of the repertoire from P.D.Q. Bach & Peter Schickele: The Jekyll and Hyde Tour plus the complete P.D.Q. Bach String Quartet in F major “The Moose”, the concert is being recorded by Telarc International Corp. for a future CD release! Here are some of the things that makes this concert and live recording so historic:
The concert takes place on June 16, 2007, and ticket prices are an amazing $10, less than the price of a CD, which could save you enough money to cover the cost of driving out to Owings Mills, for you will surely not want to miss this chance to witness history in the making. Then when the CD comes out (no, I have no idea when) you’ll be able to say “I was there and I saw the whole thing.” So be there and see the whole thing by following the link on the concert schedule page.
The Armadillo String Quartet has just announced details about their Music by Peter Schickele concert for this year. This brings to a total of 17 the number of years in a row that they have held this event. As usual, the concert will be jam packed with, as the title suggests, music by Peter Schickele, including both of his Quintets for Piano and Strings, plus the West Coast Premiere of Chapbook, for piano 6 hands, and the very first performance of After Hearing Bach, for oboe, violin, viola and cello. As in some past years, this year’s concert will take place at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (April 9th) as well as at a secret location in Brentwood (April 7th). And as always, information about the concerts, with times and links, has been added to our concert schedule page and the Armadillo’s very own page on this site.
A late entry to the concert schedule is coming up next month, or later this week, however you want to look at it. The exact date is March 3rd, the even more exact time is 2:00 p.m., and the precise location is High Meadow School in Stone Ridge, New York, in their new Performing Arts Center. It is not clear whether this new Performing Arts Center was built specifically for this performance, but the first concert listed on their flyer is Peter Schickele’s Cabaret Song Program, where he sings his own songs about life and other sundry subjects with the harmonizing assistance of David Düsing. Because it is a Saturday afternoon matinee, your children can come along to hear Mr. Schickele sing about his children.
A late entry to the radio broadcast archives page is Mr. Schickele’s recent December 23rd appearance on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. This “very special mystery guest” appearance included the premiere of Joy to the World, Especially Out of Work Musicians, an arrangement of Christmas melodies for some of the less-frequently-heard musical instruments. This work makes a good companion piece to P.D.Q. Bach’s Two and a Half Variations on “In Dulci Jubilo,” which Prof. Schickele had premiered on the same radio program exactly six years before. These two A Prairie Home Companion listings now provide good bookends for our page of radio broadcast archives, which lists Mr. Schickele’s appearance on various radio programs, with links to where audio from these appearances is archived on the World Wide Web for convenient on-line listening.