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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Vancouver USA Singers have fun with Bach spoof ‘PDQ in the ’Couve’

By , Columbian staff writer
Published:
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Peter Schickele, (dis)credited as the &quot;discoverer&quot; of P.D.Q. Bach, is rewarded for his (dis)service to classical music.
Peter Schickele, (dis)credited as the "discoverer" of P.D.Q. Bach, is rewarded for his (dis)service to classical music. (Courtesy of Peter Schickele/Nitso Productions) Photo Gallery

Classy connoisseurs of classical music know that keyboard genius Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750, wasn’t only a prolific composer of mathematically minded musical masterpieces. He was also a prodigious producer of musical children.

The J.S. Bach household was like alphabet soup. With two wives (in succession), the legendary Bach sired 20 children, including many musicians of varied accomplishment, fame and initials: singer C.D. Bach; organist J.G.B. Bach; and composers W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, J.C.F Bach and J.C. Bach.

We won’t lengthen this list into the musical grand-generations. We’ll just draw your attention to a local concert by the Vancouver USA Singers, featuring works by a “forgotten” Bach son, whom you’ll never be able to forget again — try as you might.

P.D.Q. Bach, infamously the “last and least” of Johann Sebastian’s musical children, somehow lived from 1807-1742, reportedly, and was buried in a pauper’s grave to obscure his connection with the rest of his more talented family. Alas, the secret escaped via American composer, musical scholar and jokester Peter Schickele, who claims to have discovered the lost P.D.Q. manuscripts and has spent much of his career publicizing and performing these unknown treasures.

If You Go

• What: “PDQ in the ’Couve,” featuring the Vancouver USA Singers singing silly music by P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele), plus actual classical and popular works. Soloists: Kirsten Hart, Aaron Puchardt, Cassandra Birk.

• When: 7 p.m. June 4; 3 p.m. June 5.

• Where: First Presbyterian Church, 4300 Main St., Vancouver.

• Tickets: $20; $17 in advance; children 12 and under free. Advance tickets available at vancouverusasingers.com, Beacock Music, Music World, River City Music.

Or are they? With names like “The Toot Suite,” “Fanfare for the Common Cold,” “A Little Nightmare Music,” “The Hindenburg Concierto” and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons,” some musicologists argue that Schickele should never have inflicted these best-forgotten pieces on an unsuspecting world that was perfectly happy with the Bachs we already had.

Tough toenails, music lovers. The Vancouver USA Singers are getting ready to stumble across the stage with “PDQ in the ‘Couve,” two concerts featuring the questionable masterpieces of this questionable Bach. The main attraction will be the pastorally spiced oratorio “The Seasonings,” featuring selections like “Open Sesame Seeds” and “Bide Thy Thyme.”

“The Seasonings” is heavy on the experimental instrumentation for which P.D.Q. was rightly thrust into obscurity. Watch for virtuoso performances on shower hose, kazoo, air horn, slide whistle, a paper-tube creation known as the windbreaker and of course the brass “tromboon.”

Serious fun

Jana Hart, director of the Vancouver USA Singers, said she first discovered the classical comedy of P.D.Q. Bach — the creation of Schickele — in sixth grade when her father, a conductor, brought home a record called “New Horizons in Music Appreciation: The Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Sportscast.” It featured an orchestra and two color commentators, one of them Schickele, “announcing” the entire symphony like a pro sports game.

“It was so hilarious I got sick,” Hart said. (Watch a live performance of the “Beethoven’s Fifth Sportscast” — complete with rowdy fans, referees calling fouls on musicians and an alarming groin injury in the bass section.)

As a choir director, Hart has raised money for group trips by putting on P.D.Q. Bach concerts. “Honestly, people love this music,” she said, and you really don’t need classical knowledge to get the joke. In fact, it’s musicians who take their job terribly seriously that may need a little orientation and relaxation.

“I had to explain to a few people in the choir — yes it’s supposed to sound that way. It’s supposed to be funny,” Hart said.

Initial rehearsals at Hart’s house involved assembling and, yes, mastering those bizarre pseudo-instruments. (Doesn’t matter if it’s just a shower hose, Hart said — it still needs to produce a nice D-natural.) To get the hang of the music, the group started out by playing along with a Schickele/P.D.Q. Bach album.

“We’re all sitting around my table with kazoos and these other kooky instruments,” Hart said. “We had to figure out, how do you do this? We put on the recording and opened our scores and just started laughing.”

But seriously, folks

After the Vancouver USA Singers finish mangling the already-mangled P.D.Q. Bach in the first half of this concert, they’ll get a bit more serious. For one thing, they’ll welcome soprano Kirsten Hart, daughter of the director, as special guest star for the second half of the concert. Hart will perform the tragic role of Santuzza in selections from the opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” by Pietro Mascagni. She will also solo with the choir in the Moses Hogan spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

Kirsten Hart, a graduate of Skyview High School and Pacific University, has sung with the Portland Opera, Bel Canto Opera and Boston Lyric Opera companies. She now lives in Boston, where she just earned her graduate degree in voice from the New England Conservatory of Music.

Proud mother Jana Hart described her 31-year-old daughter as “a Wagnerian soprano” with a voice “rich and dark and gleaming. She’s young, but her voice is beautiful and huge.”

The concert will also include Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and medleys of popular tunes from “Beauty and the Beast” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Two young singers, Aaron Puchardt of Battle Ground High School and Cassandra Birk of Skyview High School, will be featured soloists during the former; during the latter, members of the choir will play spoons, washboards and the jug bass for an appropriately rustic sound.

“We’ve done a lot of gorgeous, serious music,” Hart said. “This is going to be our fun concert.”

Vancouver Singers is an all-volunteer, by-audition, mixed-voice community chorus with members ages 18 to 80. The group recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and has twice appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Visit vancouverusasingers.org.

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