P.D.Q. Bach - Missa Hilarious (S. N2O)
0:00 - Yriekay
4:51 - Gloria
7:52 - Credo
11:39 - Sanctus
15:28 - Angus Dei
John Ferrante, bargain countertenor
Harris Poor, basso blotto
Duh Brooklyn Boys Choir
The New York Pick-Up Ensemble
Professor Peter Schickele, conductor
Ransom Wilson and Diva Goodfriend-Koven, tape recorders, hand flutes, corrugahorns, nose flutes
Early Anderson, trombone & trombonus interruptus
P.D.Q. Bach is known to have written a significant amount of religious music, but the Missa Hilarious is the only work that seems to have survived. It was given by the Pope as the principal reason for his excommunication of P.D. Q. in 1787. Most listeners, after hearing it, would agree that the composer got off easy- he's lucky he wasn't burned at the stake. More amazing, however, is the fact that after P.D.Q. Bach was severed from the Church, he continued to write sacred music (such as the Half-Nelson Mass, apparently written in the 1790s) This was a source of great consternation to the College of Cardinals, who interpreted it as a flaunting of authority, and when, in 1803 P. D. Q. wrote the Passion According to Hoyle, all of his religious music was placed on the Index by the Pope, thus categorically precluding its inclusion (unlikely in any case) in any public or institutional Library. While it is well known that many books have gained in popularity as a result of being placed on the Index, in the case of P.D.Q. Bach's religious music it seems that the Pope's action sank the last nail into the coffin, as it were.
Other allegedly sacred works of P.D.Q. were the Famous Last Words of Christ (composed in 1781 or 82) and the Mass in the Allah Mode The latter apparently showed the influence of the composer's sojourn in Turkey; the sacrilegiousness of its Near Eastern aspects, both in terms of religious dogma and musical style, was one of the few things the Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy agreed upon.
The instrumentation of the Missa Hilariosa, in addition to strings and timpani, includes two trumpets and a trombone (each of which must, upon occasion, be relieved of certain slides that are integral parts of the instrument, thus transforming it into either a trumpetus or a trombonus interruptus and giving it its sickly tone quality) and two players playing diverse flutes: tape recorders (not to be confused with the modern sound-reproducing device, the eighteenth-century tape recorder was a flute-like instrument made out of adhesive tape), hand flutes (whose pitch is changed by curling the hand around a small mouthpiece), the corrugahorn (a reticulated metal pipe which plays only the notes of the overtone series, and even those barely audibly) and nose flutes (the less said about these instruments the better).
The work has five movements, the first of which - Yriekay - indicates that ecclesiastical Latin was not the only kind of Latin P.D.Q. Bach knew. After the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus, the piece ends with a tribute not to a lamb but to a Sacred Cow, the Angus Dei.
The sole performance of Misa Hilarioss in P.D.Q.’s lifetime was given in Wein-am-Rhein's only cathedral, Our Lady of the Evening. The autograph score bears, after the last double bar, the inscription "Deo gratias (Thank God!) These words are not in the composer's handwriting, and it may be presumed that they were an expression of relief on the part of the copyist-relief that this disturbingly compelling slice of blasphemia was finally off his hands.
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