Four Curmudgeonly Canons

Item Number: PR.312416750

6.875 x 10.5 inches. Text: Peter Schickele.

It's easy to see why P.D.Q. Bach would have been drawn to the round as a musical form: he and his companions were used to ordering gas many rounds as possible before closing time, and also. the thing about a round is, you only have to write one line of music (it might be pointed out that the tricky part is making that one line of music work out when it is sung with staggered entrances, but that assumes that the composer cares about how the end result sounds, and it also underestimates P.D.Q. Bach's familiarity with staggered entrances). Since all the evidence indicates that the disposition of the Minimeister of Wein-am-Rhein was quite easygoing and backgelad, and since the text of the FOUR CURMUDGEONLY CANONS is strikingly pessimistic, especially for the Age of Enlightenment, it is hard to resist speculating that the present work was commissioned by a world-class griper, or at least written with such a person in mind. The most likely candidate is the self-styled ruler of a northerly quasi-kingdom on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Alto Saxony. This minor satrap's constant complaining so irritated everyone around him that he was known as King Frederick the Grate. He and his self-centered son, Frederick the Ingrate, had traveled through Wein-am-Rhein sometime in 1799 on their way to a vacation on the French Riviera ("All I can say is, Noce work if you can get it," as P.D.Q. Bach wrote his cousin Peter Ulrich Bach). King Frederick is known to have preferred vocal music over instrumental music because "instruments sound as if they enjoy being played, whereas singers always look as if they are wearing someone else's - and someone smaller's - corset." The time and place of these canons' first performance have been lost in the mists of time and place, but they were published (in English) around 1810 by P.D.Q. Bach's favorite drinking companion Jonathan "Boozey" Hawkes, who after the composer's death returned to his native Liverpool and published most, if not much, of his deceased friend's vocal music. The first modern performanced took place un December 1991, under the history-rich roof of New York City's famous Carnegie Hall; the performers were the Canticum Novum Vocalizers under the direction of Harold Rosenbaum, who should know better but doesn't.