P.D.Q. BACH UNGAGGED : PETER SCHICKELE SINGS HIS SONGS AT EMBASSY

Peter Schickele, the usually delirious alter ego of P.D.Q. Bach, didn’t swing down to the stage of the Embassy Theatre Tuesday night via a rope ladder from the balcony. Too bad. He just strolled on, looking amiable and a bit sheepish. Without ado about anything, he plunked himself down at the keyboard.

He didn’t wear his usual uniform--slightly slept-in formal attire with an eternally unruly shirttail hanging out, plus brown workman’s shoes. He sported a casual tan suit with a dark and blotchy, impeccably tucked-in casual shirt. His hair--he has a lot--was uncharacteristically kempt. Instead of looking wild, winsome and wanton, he looked meek, conventional, paternal.

He hadn’t come, alas, to bury the Baroque or to buzz Beethoven. He hadn’t come to fake an opera or to ridicule any rituals. He had come to introduce to Los Angeles a homemade collection of Midwestern cabaret chansons, bar-room ballads, false folk songs and domestic ditties.

He was serious. Whimsical, to a degree, but serious.

Contrary to popular speculation, Schickele hasn’t spent every waking moment of his life cheering a dreary universe with the recycled exploits of J.S. Bach’s 21st and oddest son. He has written film scores, including that of an epiDernic science fiction opus called “Silent Running.” He has written quasi-rocky stuff and quasi-classical stuff, even a bona fide opera. He has made deathless musical contributions to such disparate projects as “Sesame Street” and “Oh! Calcutta!”

He probably has delighted family and friends, after a good meal and a few stimulating glasses, when cajoled to entertain at the parlor piano. He has, after all, cranked out a lot of sweetly amusing, mildly clever, essentially unpretentious little songs about the ever-lovin’ wife and kids and cats, about the agonies of dieting, about the loneliness of being a long-distance satirist. He has even set to melody a brash and vamping commencement speech, originally delivered on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from Swarthmore.

He writes hick tunes and mundane rhymes the way ordinary mortals chew gum. He likes to give the nostalgic results as commemorative gifts to his intimates. It is, yawn, very nice.

Unfortunately, the repertory in question doesn’t provide Schickele with enough substance to enthrall an audience of strangers. Not, at any rate, for a full evening in a formidable concert hall.

One can admire the quirky keyboard patterns he stomps out with relentless enthusiasm. One can be charmed by the pretend-primitive texts, with their unexpected twists of irony or gush. One can be engaged by Schickele’s falsetto baritone whine, his deft nasal twang. One can be intrigued by the fusion of the sophisticated and the primitive, by the marriage of elegant melismas and honky-tonk rumbles.

But not for long.

After 20 minutes or so, it all begins to sound the same. What should be surprising becomes predictable. Formula funk can only be stretched so far, and cliches, whether cosmic or comic, have their rhetorical limit.

Even if Schickele were a composer and chanteur of earth-shattering skill, he would have a hard time making much of an impact before a tiny, ever-decreasing audience in a 1,600-seat, atrociously amplified hall. The good professor met his Waterloo at the Embassy.

The conditions are better, no doubt, at the Student Disunion near the Department of Musicolology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.