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Definitions to Help You Understand the Introduction |
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introduction into this wonderful piece of musical heritage.)
Who is PDQ Bach??? P.D.Q. Bach is the creation of Peter Schickele who claims to be a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople (also fictional). PDQ never really existed. So why create all of this stuff for someone who never existed????? It's fun! What about Harry Potter? We sure know a lot about him and he never existed! Fiction is fun.
His 21st son? Johann Sebastian Bach DID live in Leipzig. JS Bach is real; Leipzig is real. JS Bach had 20 children, not 21. PDQ is fiction.
Exhume & other grave matters To exhume a body means to dig it up. Sometime famous people (like Mozart) who were buried in unmarked graves (too poor to have a nice grave site with a head stone) were later exhumed and reburied in a better graveyard & with a head stone. It happened the other way around for PDQ; he was in a decent site & later exhumed & reburied in an unmarked pauper's grave! (Yet another hint that something is fishy in this story! And another hint that PDQ was not a particularly well liked person!) PDQ was rather slovenly, (which means he didn't take care of himself), lazy, drank too much and generally did not live up to the highly esteemed Bach name!
Stand for something! When people have really strong beliefs that they will "stand up for", we often say something like, "She is a wonderful person; she stands for truth, justice and the equality of all people!" To "stand for" something means that you will speak up, work hard toward whatever it may be and that you are not afraid to be seen. PDQ? He stood for nothing... and there is a pun because remember, the PDQ was just initials, no name (so it didn't stand for anything). And Wilhelm Friedemann Bach really was Johann Sebastian's oldest son.
The Musical Saw  Odd as it may seem, the musical saw is a real instrument, not something created for PDQ Bach! The Saw Lady's (Natalia Paruz) website is a wealth of knowledge with audio and video examples\
Echo Sonata An echo sonata is a real kind of music -- it requires two groups of musicians, usually on opposite sides of the audience. One group plays a phrase & the second echoes it. Group one plays, group two echoes, etc. This type of music was very popular in the Baroque period. Now if you were a composer writing a piece of music and you wanted to show that the two groups were unfriendly, what would you do? Think about it for a moment, then click here to see some of the things other students have suggested.
Ideas for an Echo Sonata with two unfriendly groups of instruments. Other students have said they would:
PDQ Bach does all of this and more in his Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments. |