DISCOVER THE MAGIC OF P.D.Q. BACH
 
I grew up listening to P.D.Q. Bach. In fact, I heard the
themes of many famous classical pieces first in pieces 
like the Unbegun Symphony, and only 
later in the pieces they were lifted from, with the 
result that when I hear 
these pieces by the great masters for the first time, I
laugh out loud, whereas when I heard the P.D.Q. quotes of them 
I didn't laugh since I had no context.
 
I also grew up performing P.D.Q. Bach: in high school choir
we did the famous "My Bonny Lass, she smelleth" paired with 
the piece it parodies ("... she smileth"); later, in college, 
I sang Close Encounter Tenor in "Hansel & 
Gretel & Ted & Alice", "Twelve Quite Heavenly Songs",
"Diverse Aires on Sundrie Notions" and the grand oratorio 
"The Seasonings" under the baton of 
the redoubtable Vytas Baksys, who in addition to playing a
mean piano and being a good conductor also performed the 
trumpet part of the "Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of 
Instruments" on the trombone.
 
There is no excuse for ignorance of this corpus which makes
a mockery of Ned Rorem's claim that music has no humor in it 
and needs words to be funny. 
Check out the web site, see a concert, buy the albums, get
to know the pieces, perform them, don't let them die. "The 
Abduction of Figaro" is a first-rate opera that should be done 
everywhere, yet when I performed one of the arias in a recital 
in 1991 the publisher Boosey & Hawkes sent us copies 
of the manuscript, which we then rendered into printed music
on the computer. I hear through a friend that one can now rent 
this score, but I haven't seen it.

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