P. D. Q. Bach is a fictional composer invented by the American musical satirist Peter Schickele, who developed a five-decade-long career performing the "discovered" works of the "only forgotten son" of the Bach family. Schickele's music combines parodies of musicological scholarship, the conventions of Baroque and Classical music, and slapstick comedy. The name is a parody of the three-part names given to some members of the Bach family that are commonly reduced to initials, such as , for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; PDQ is an initialism for "pretty damned quick". Schickele began working on the character while studying at the Aspen Music Festival and School and Juilliard, and has performed a variety of Bach shows over the years. The Village Voice mentions the juxtaposition of collage, bitonality, musical satire, and orchestral surrealism in a "bizarre melodic stream of consciousness ... In P.D.Q. Bach he has single-handedly mapped a musical universe that everyone knew was there and no one else had the guts (not simply the bad taste) to explore." As of 2012, Schickele had reduced his touring due to age. On December 28 and 29, 2015 at The Town Hall in New York, he performed two concerts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first concert. Biography Schickele gives a humorous fictional biography of the composer according to which P. D. Q. Bach was born in Leipzig on April 1, 1742, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach; the twenty-first of Johann's twenty children. He is also referred to as "the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian’s 20-odd children". He died May 5, 1807, though his birth and death years are often listed on album literature in reverse, as "(1807–1742)?". According to Schickele, "possessed the originality of Johann Christian, the arrogance of Carl Philipp Emanuel, and the obscurity of Johann Christoph Friedrich". Music Schickele's works attributed to P. D. Q. Bach often incorporate comical rearrangements of well-known works of other composers. The works use instruments not normally used in orchestras, such as the bagpipes, slide whistle, kazoo, and fictional or experimental instruments such as the pastaphone (made of uncooked manicotti), tromboon, hardart, lasso d'amore, and left-handed sewer flute. There is often a startling juxtaposition of styles within a single Bach piece. The Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz, which alludes to Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach, provides an example. The underlying music is J.S. Bach's