Peter Schickele

Johann Peter Schickele (; From 1990 to 1993, Schickele’s P. D. Q. Bach recordings earned him four consecutive wins for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. was born on July 17, 1935, in Ames, Iowa, to Alsatian immigrant parents. His father, Rainer Schickele (1905, Berlin – 1989, Berkeley, California), was the son of writer René Schickele and was an agricultural economist teaching at Iowa State University. In 1945, Schickele’s father took a position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., then became chairman of the Agricultural Sciences Department at North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University) in Fargo, North Dakota in 1946. He was a contemporary of Ted Nelson at Swarthmore, and he scored Nelson’s experimental film The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow. It was his first film score. He graduated from the Juilliard School in 1960 with a master’s degree in musical composition. He studied composition with Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. Early career Schickele wrote music for a number of folk musicians, most notably Joan Baez, for whom he also orchestrated and arranged three albums during the mid-1960s, Noël (1966), Joan (1967), and Baptism (1968).