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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley.

Well, hello there everybody.

This is your friendly Professor Peter Shikily.

The composer, musician, author, and comedian Peter Shikily died last week.

He was 88 years old. Shikly had a serious background in classical music.

He played the bassoon and got a master's degree in music from the Juilliard school

and even taught there.

Over his long career, he composed more than 100 serious musical works, symphonies, choral and chamber

works, and solo instrumentals.

He also wrote for film in the theater.

He supplied songs for the infamous Broadway musical O Calcutta,

and wrote the music for the cult science fiction movie Silent Running, which included songs sung by Joan Baez. Heels of children running wild in the sun.

Like a forest is you child, growing wild. But Peter Shickley was known for concocting, presenting and performing the works of PDQ Bach, whom Shikily claimed was the youngest

and oddest of Johann Sebastian Bach's 20-odd children. Shikily, claiming to be a musicologist, would perform premieres of newly unearthed works by

PDQ Bach, works which demonstrated both Shickley's talents as a composer and a ranger,

and his shamelessly childish sense of humor.

PDQ's first work performed on stage in 1965 was called Concerto for Horn and Hard Art.

An album was released that same year, launching a parody mini-empire

that ended up eclipsing Shickley's more serious work. But Shickley had only himself

...