THE CURTAIN FALLS ON THE STONED GUEST.

Word reaches Cold Spring Shops of the death of Peter Schickele.  So often it is, dear reader, that what you aspire to and what you become known for are wildly different.

Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele, who said his health had declined after a series of infections last fall.

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera and other notable ensembles, as well as by the folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.

But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.

For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.

No, that is not bad company to keep, although it might be up to a future successor to discover the Jagermeister quartet in one of those taverns.  What he did discover was pretty cool, and read the obituary, dear reader, to learn more about the instrumentation.

Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”

With these and myriad other works, Mr. Schickele, who billed himself as P.D.Q.’s “discoverer,” gleefully punctured the reverent pomposity that can attend classical-music culture.

It was P.D.Q., after all, whose work won four Grammy Awards to Mr. Schickele’s one. It was P.D.Q. who packed some of New York’s foremost concert halls for decades of annual Christmastime concerts. And it was P.D.Q. who, unbidden, could rear his head insidiously at performances of Mr. Schickele’s serious music, with audience members who had come expecting belly laughs sometimes walking out in bewilderment.

It's fitting, as well, that someone who grew up near Zap would pass near Woodstock, and write for protest singers.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

After earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Swarthmore College in 1957, Mr. Schickele received a master’s from the Juilliard School in 1960. Over the years, he studied with the composers Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti.

The campus cut-up, though, was always in him.

Needing to flesh out the program of a student concert, Mr. Schickele recalled a work that he, his brother and a friend had written as teenagers in the early 1950s: “The Sanka Cantata,” a parody of Bach père’s “Coffee Cantata,” which they ascribed to a Bach black sheep they called P.D.Q. (in common parlance, short for pretty damn quick).

Although the Vatican sought to excommunicate P. D. Q. for his Missa Hilarious, the Musical Community never excommunicated Professor Schickele.  In the manner of popularizers everywhere, he might have brought in listeners who, after the joke, stuck around for the stuff that inspired it.

But by the mid-1960s, Mr. Schickele, as resolute a populist as ever in his own compositions, had begun to bridle at the entrenched musical snobberies that he felt defined Juilliard in those years. Perhaps P.D.Q., he thought, could commute his sentence.

It's still football season, and maybe there will be time to put his play-by-play of Heilige Dankgesang taking on the orchestra in Beethoven's Fifth on the Victrola.  R. I. P.