By JEANNETTE FANG

I heard Peter Schickele before I saw him. In the quiet hum of the Board Room, his voice was a constant stream of witticism that washed around me as I walked in from the foyer. A few students already sat scattered around Schickele as he talked and ate with relish. That stream never really stopped, even once the program got underway. If you had questions, you had to jump to get them out—but you wouldn't have had many anyway, since the darting thoughts left you no time to remember what you wanted to ask.

I expected Schickele to look and sound like Santa Claus. But despite the Brahmsian beard and jolly tufts of hair, he was not at all the over-the-top persona I'd anticipated. This did not detract from the hilarity, however. Our luncheon was made slightly hazardous, as the jokes flowed by so quickly that the inevitable laughter of delayed recognition made for reddened faces and choking on sandwiches.

Peter Schickele shares a high five with his alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

"I used to always say that I majored in cafeteria at Juilliard," he started. It was here in 1959 that Schickele (M.S. '60, composition) inaugurated his practice of composing for strange ensembles, premiering his Concerto for Horn and Hardart as a last-minute filler for a concert. Then came the Symphonia Concertante featuring the ocarina and double-reed slide music stand, which he wrote in Aspen. This was such a success that these comic concerts became an annual affair, raising enough interest for Schickele to inaugurate the first public P.D.Q. Bach concert at Town Hall in 1965. (The P.D.Q. concept had actually been born about 12 years earlier, when Schickele and his buddies were taping a mock radio show and needed to provide an author for the Sanka Cantata.) He had hoped interest in the concerts would last about five years—not at all foreseeing the 40-year anniversary that 2006 brought. Which he is thankful for, of course. "A satirist always makes fun of what he likes," he told us. "If I had had no affinity towards Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, then I would have gotten tired of it."

During the luncheon, Schick-ele constantly re-iterated how "extremely lucky" he was. He had stopped teaching at Juilliard in 1965, "a fairly gutsy thing because I didn't quite know what to do." But his timing was fortuitous: the rise of LPs with their accompanying liner notes made the 1960s the perfect decade for a satire on the scholarship behind P.D.Q. Bach—making him, according to Schickele, "the only dead composer that is still commissioned."

After two decades of touring as P.D.Q., Schickele began to feel he "was going on automatic pilot." The notion for a radio broadcast that became Schickele Mix in 1992 (distributed by Public Radio International) had been gestating for two years. His plan was to broadcast demonstrations of musical ideas and forms drawing "examples from all kinds of music"—even a string-quartet version of Guns and Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." He managed to get 169 shows out before running out of money in 1999. (The shows are still rebroadcast on public radio stations.)

Which made us wonder: What inspired the funny in Peter Schickele?

"I was a huge Spike Jonze freak in my youth. Huge," he told us. He also remembers being impressed by the creative use of cowbells in Bing Crosby's performances, and the satire of classical music that George Hoffman, his classmate at Swarthmore, did.

As he started to wrap up, saying that he was thankful for "getting all the commissions that I wanted," I was shocked by how late it was. The ocean of Schickele-isms had completely obliterated the time; 50 minutes of my L&M IV class had gone by and I was still on the second floor. I had hoped that my luncheon-attending teaching assistant would at least get to the classroom before I did, but being friends with Schickele, he had a passport for hobnobbing. But when he did finally come, he brought the most valid excuse there was: P.D.Q. himself.

Strange—but in the classroom, telling of his erstwhile romps with his old friend Larry Widdoes, Schickele seemed different than he had in the Board Room. Instead of the subdued orator, hands folded across his paunch, he became the rollicking Santa Claus character I had first expected, nimble yet huge in front of our eyes.

After he had left, there was a silence as we all stared at the books on our desks. A few chairs creaked; a piece of paper dropped to the floor.

"Oh drat. I can't teach a class after this," said Mr. Widdoes.

Jeannette Fang is a fourth-year piano student.