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. http://www.schickele.com