Look up pdq in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

This is a three-letter abbreviation which means "pretty damned (or darn) quick(ly)" but may refer more specifically to the following list of products or services available:

• PDQ (Predictive Dynamic Quoting), printing industry estimating software developed by Haybrooke Associates Limited
• P. D. Q. Bach, fictional composer and son of Johann Sebastian Bach, invented by musical satirist "Professor" Peter Schickele
• PDQ Food Stores, a convenience store chain in the American Midwest
• Physician Data Query, an online database developed by the National Cancer Institute
• PDQ (game show), an American television game show which aired from 1966 to 1969
• PDQ Chocolate, a flavored drink mix, sponsor and namesake of the above mentioned game show
• PDQ Manufacturing, a car wash manufacturer of both touch free (brushless) and friction (brush) equipment
• PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick), computer performance analysis software developed by Neil J. Gunther
• PDQ ("Process Data Quickly") terminals, which process credit card and debit card transactions
• Prose Descriptive Qualities, a role-playing game system
• PDQ (also known as "Wallstreet II"), a code name of specific models of the PowerBook G3 Series by Apple Computer, Inc.

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Johann Peter Schickele (born July 17, 1935) is an American composer, musical educator, and parodist, best known for comedy albums featuring music written by Schickele, but which he presents as being composed by the fictional P. D. Q. Bach.

Biography[link]

Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, to Alsatian immigrant parents, and brought up in Washington, D.C., and Fargo, North Dakota, where he studied composition with Sigvald Thompson. Graduating from Fargo Central High in 1952 and then graduating with a degree in music from Swarthmore College in 1957, he was the first student at Swarthmore and the only student in his class with such a degree. He graduated from the Juilliard School with an M.S. in musical composition; in the ensuing years he has frequently cited Roy Harris as the most influential of his teachers.

Career[link]

Schickele has composed more than 100 original works for symphony orchestra, choral groups, chamber ensemble, voice, film (e.g. Silent Running, and animated adaptations of Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen),^[1] and television. He has also written music for school bands, as well as a number of folk musicians, most notably Joan Baez (for whom he also orchestrated and arranged three albums during the mid-1960s, Noël, Joan, and Baptism). He has also written a number of musicals, and has organized numerous concert performances as both musical director and performer. Schickele is active on the international and North American concert circuit.

Schickele's musical creations have won him multiple awards. His extensive body of work is marked by a distinctive style which integrates the European classical tradition with an unmistakable American idiom. As a musical educator he also hosted the classical music educational radio program Schickele Mix which was broadcast on many public radio stations in the United States. Lack of funding ended the production of new programs in the late 1990s, and rebroadcasts of the existing programs finally ceased in June 2007.^[2] Only 119 of the 169 programs were in the rebroadcast rotation, because earlier shows contained American Public Radio production IDs rather than ones crediting Public Radio International. In March 2006, some of the other "lost episodes" were added back to the rotation, with one notable program remnant of the Periodic Table of Musics, listing the names of musicians and composers as mythical element names in a format reminiscent of the Periodic table.^[3]

In recent years, Schickele has created the non-P.D.Q. Bach albums Hornsmoke, Sneaky Pete and the Wolf, and The Emperor's New Clothes.^{[citation needed]}

Schickele, an accomplished bassoonist, was also a member of the chamber rock trio Open Window, which wrote and performed music for the revue Oh! Calcutta!. Schickele's two children, Matt and Karla, have been members of various indie rock bands, including Beekeeper, Ida, K, and M Shanghai String Band.^[4] His brother was the film director and musician David Schickele (d. 1999).^[5]

Schickele's music is published by the Theodore Presser Company.

P. D. Q. Bach[link]

Besides composing music under his own name, Schickele has developed an elaborate parodic persona built around his studies of the fictional "youngest and the oddest of the twenty-odd children" of Johann Sebastian Bach, P.D.Q. Bach. His clever parodies of baroque and classical music, written under this particular Bach’s name, have earned him four Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Performance/Album. Among the huge repertory still being uncovered by the diligent Schickele are such challenging works as The Abduction of Figaro, Canine Cantata: "Wachet Arf!" (S. K9), Good King Kong Looked Out, the Trite Quintet (S. 6 of 1), "O Little Town of Hackensack", A Little Nightmare Music, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, and perhaps best known of all, the dramatic oratorio, Oedipus Tex, featuring the O.K. Chorale. Though P.D.Q. Bach is ostensibly a Baroque composer, Schickele extends his parodic repertoire to modern works such as "Einstein on the Fritz", a parody of his Juilliard classmate Philip Glass.

His fictitious "home establishment," where he reports having tenure as "Very Full Professor Peter Schickele" of "musicolology" and "musical pathology", is the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, a little-known institution which does not normally welcome out-of-state visitors. To illustrate the work of his uncovered composer, Schickele invented a range of rather unusual instruments. The most complicated of these is the Hardart, a variety of tone-generating devices mounted on the frame of an "automat", a coin-operated food dispenser. The modified automat is used in the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, a play on the name of proprietors Horn & Hardart, who pioneered the North American use of the automat in their restaurants.

Schickele also invented the "dill piccolo" for playing sour notes, the "left-handed sewer flute", the "tromboon", the "lasso d'amore", the double-reed slide music stand, which he described as having "a range of major third and even less expressiveness," the "tuba mirum", a flexible tube filled with wine, and the "pastaphone", an uncooked tube of manicotti pasta played as a horn. And then there was the extensively described but (so far as is known) never demonstrated über klavier or super piano, with a keyboard ranging from sounds which only dogs can hear down to sounds which only whales can make. Sample sheet music was provided in P.D.Q.'s unauthorized autobiography, published in 1976. P.D.Q's Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons (1965) demonstrated the inherent musical qualities of everyday objects in ways not equally agreeable to all who listen to them. As of 2012, however, Schickele's invented instruments are strangely absent from a website documenting oddball hybrid and improvised musical instruments.^[6]

To some degree, Schickele's music written as P.D.Q. Bach has overshadowed Schickele's work as a "serious" composer.^[7][8]

The humorous aspect of Schickele's musical career came from his early interest in the music of Spike Jones, whose musical ensemble lampooned popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. While at Juilliard (1959) Schickele teamed with conductor Jorge Mester to present a humorous concert, which became an annual event at the college. In 1965, Schickele moved the concept to Town Hall and invited the public to attend. Vanguard Records released an album of that concert, and P. D. Q. Bach's career was launched.^[1]

References[link]

• Schickele, Peter (1976). The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-46536-9. 

External links[link]

• The Peter Schickele/P.D.Q. Bach Web Site
• Peter Schickele page at Theodore Presser Company
• Periodic Table of Musics
• The Peter Schickele Myspace (Maintained by Fan)

Audio links

• Peter Schickele interview
• "Composing Thoughts" radio interview

Itzhak Perlman
Background information
Born	(1945-08-31) August 31, 1945 (age 66) Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine (now in Israel)
Genres	Classical, Jazz, Klezmer, Baroque
Occupations	Conductor, pedagogue, violinist
Instruments	Violin
Years active	1963–present
Associated acts	St. Louis Symphony, New York Philharmonic, etc.
Website	itzhakperlman.com
Notable instruments
Violin General Kyd Stradivarius 1714 Soil Stradivarius 1714 Sauret Guarnerius del Gesu 1743 ex-Kreisler Bergonzi 1740

Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן‎; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-born violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes. He is regarded as one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th and early-21st centuries.

Early life[link]

Perlman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were natives of Poland and had independently immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s before they met and got married. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied entrance to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin.^[1] He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10,^[2] before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy Delay.^[3]

Perlman contracted polio at the age of four. He made a good recovery, learning to walk with crutches. Today, he uses crutches or an electric Amigo scooter for mobility and plays the violin while seated.

Career[link]

Performing[link]

Ed Sullivan congratulates Itzhak Perlman after a concert (1958)

Perlman was introduced to the wider American public when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show twice in 1958.^[4] He made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1963 and won the Leventritt Competition in 1964. Soon afterward he began to tour widely. In addition to an extensive recording and performance career, he has continued to make guest appearances on American television shows such as The Tonight Show and Sesame Street, as well as playing at a number of functions at the White House.^{[citation needed]}

Although he has never been billed or marketed as a singer, he sang the role of "Un carceriere" ("a jailer") on a 1981 EMI recording of Puccini's Tosca which featured Renata Scotto, Plácido Domingo, and Renato Bruson, with James Levine conducting. He had earlier sung the role in an excerpt from the opera on a 1980 Pension Fund Benefit Concert telecast as part of the Live from Lincoln Center series, with Luciano Pavarotti as Cavaradossi, and Zubin Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic. Perlman is a basso.

On July 5, 1986, he performed on the New York Philharmonic's tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, which was televised live on ABC Television.^[5]. The orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, performed in Central Park.

In 1987, he joined the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for their concerts in Warsaw and Budapest, as well as other Eastern bloc countries. He toured with the IPO in the spring of 1990 for their first-ever performance in the Soviet Union, with concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, and toured with the IPO again in 1994, performing in China and India.

While primarily a solo artist, Perlman has performed with a number of other notable musicians, including Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Isaac Stern, and Yuri Temirkanov at the 150th anniversary celebration of Tchaikovsky in Leningrad in December 1990. He has also performed (and recorded) with good friend and fellow Israeli violinist Pinchas Zukerman on numerous occasions over the years.

As well as playing and recording the classical music for which he is best known, Perlman has also played jazz, including an album made with jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, and klezmer. Perlman has been a soloist for a number of movie scores, notably the score of the 1993 film Schindler's List by John Williams, which subsequently won an Academy Award for best score. More recently, he was the violin soloist for the 2005 film Memoirs of a Geisha, along with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Perlman played selections from the musical scores of the movies nominated for "Best Original Score" at the 73rd Academy Awards with Yo-Yo Ma, and at the 78th Academy Awards.

Notable performances[link]

Perlman played at the state dinner attended by Queen Elizabeth II on May 7, 2007, in the East Room at the White House.^[6]

He performed John Williams' "Air and Simple Gifts" at the 2009 inauguration ceremony for Barack Obama, along with Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Gabriela Montero (piano) and Anthony McGill (clarinet). The quartet played along with a recording they had made two days earlier, as stringed instruments cannot reliably stay tuned in subfreezing temperatures. Additionally, he has twice performed as a Pennington Great Performers series artist with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and 2007.

Instrument[link]

Perlman plays using the antique Soil Stradivarius violin of 1714, formerly owned by Yehudi Menuhin and considered to be one of the finest violins made during Stradivari's "golden period". Perlman also plays the Sauret Guarneri del Gesu of c.1743.

Conducting[link]

In recent years, Perlman has begun to conduct, taking the post of principal guest conductor at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He served as music advisor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2002–2004. In November, 2007, the Westchester Philharmonic announced the appointment of Perlman as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. His first concert in these roles was on October 11, 2008, in an all-Beethoven program featuring pianist Leon Fleisher performing the Emperor Concerto.

Teaching[link]

In 1975 Perlman accepted a faculty post at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College. In 2003, Mr. Perlman was named the holder of the Dorothy Richard Starling Foundation Chair in Violin Studies at the Juilliard School, succeeding his teacher, Dorothy DeLay. He also currently instructs pupils on a one-on-one basis at the Perlman Music Program on Long Island, NY, rarely holding master classes. He also taught at a community center in Be'er Sheba, Israel,^[7]

The Perlman Music Program[link]

The Perlman music program, founded in 1995 by Toby Perlman and Suki Sandler, started as a summer camp for exceptional string musicians between the ages of 11 and 18.^[8] Over time, it expanded to be offered year-long. The program allows the students the chance to be coached by Itzhak Perlman himself before playing at venues such as the Sutton Place Synagogue and public schools.^[9] By introducing students to each other and requiring practice sessions together, musicians who would otherwise be practicing alone develop a network of friends and colleagues in the profession. Rather than remain isolated, participants in the program find an area where they belong.^[10]

Personal life[link]

Perlman resides in New York City with his wife, Toby, also a classically trained violinist. They have five children: Noah, Navah, Leora, Rami and Ariella. Perlman is a distant cousin to Canadian comic/TV personality Howie Mandel.

Honors and awards[link]

• Leventritt Competition – Winner (1964)
• Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance:
  • Daniel Barenboim & Itzhak Perlman for Brahms: The Three Violin Sonatas (1991)
  • Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lynn Harrell & Itzhak Perlman for Beethoven: The Complete Piano Trios (1988)
  • Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lynn Harrell & Itzhak Perlman for Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A Minor (1982)
  • Itzhak Perlman & Pinchas Zukerman for Music for Two Violins (Moszkowski: Suite For Two Violins/Shostakovich: Duets/Prokofiev: Sonata for Two Violins) (1981)
  • Itzhak Perlman & Vladimir Ashkenazy for Beethoven: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (1979)
• Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)
• Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra)
• Grammy Award for Best Classical Album
• Kennedy Center Honors in 2003
• April 1980: Newsweek magazine featured Mr.Perlman with a cover story.^[11]
• 1986: Honored with the "Medal of Liberty" by President Reagan.^[12]
• 2000: Awarded the "National Medal of Arts" by President Clinton.^[12]
• Awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Roosevelt, Yeshiva and Hebrew Universities.^[12]

In 2005, he was voted the 135th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.^[13]

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Itzhak Perlman

External links[link]

• IMG Artists Biography
• Official Myspace page
• Itzhak Perlman at Allmusic
• Itzhak Perlman at the Internet Movie Database
• Itzhak Perlman biography in the World Concert Artist directory
• Itzhak Perlman interview on The Charlie Rose Show, (Video) 8-9-2010
• Itzhak Perlman & John Williams interview on The Charlie Rose Show, (Video) 8-8-1997