![]() ![]() The soundtrack of the 1973 heist comedy “The Sting,” with its signature piece, “The Entertainer,” brought his music back into public attention decades later, and the result was a ragtime revival, with E.L. He had trouble drawing interest from publishers, and Joplin’s life ended in illness and poverty, scraping by in an essentially common-law marriage. The culmination of Joplin’s trajectory was an opera, “Treemonisha.” It was not precisely a ragtime opera, and not quite a folk opera, though in some ways he anticipated George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” “Treemonisha” is the story of a Black woman in a small town who uses her education to coax her people away from belief in ghosts and charms, and the sinister peddlers who make their living selling them to the naïve. My sense is that, despite having been a member of the Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent Association, Joplin was not as passionate about the performer-centered genres of vaudeville and Broadway: He wanted audiences to focus on the music itself. The more you study his life and career, the more it seems that Joplin was less devoted to Broadway, even though he reportedly wrote a few stage works that are now lost. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson got this ball rolling starting at the end of the 19th century, influencing white musicians such as Berlin, Jerome Kern and the now lesser-known Louis Hirsch, celebrated as revolutionizing the show tune. ![]() These musicians, often followed by white musicians who reaped more of the glory and rewards, provided the jolt that transformed the Broadway sound: Will Marion Cook, Bob Cole and the brothers J. But he did not take his place among the cadre of Black musicians who had gathered there by this time, who infused mainstream pop with a Black element. A song of this kind that has probably lived longest is Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” In 1911, when it was released, this song was America’s ragtime more than “Maple Leaf Rag,” despite that for all the Berlin song’s charm and craft, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Maple Leaf Rag” is as deviled ham is to pâté de foie gras.Īfter years of moving around, alternately settling down and touring, Joplin moved to New York City in 1907. While some players of the day competed in head-to-head piano duels called “cutting contests,” Joplin would affix his pieces with the warning - really, scolding: “ It is never right to play ragtime fast.” Clearly, he wanted audiences to savor the melodies and harmonies like wine or, more to the point, like Mozart.īut the public’s sense of what “ragtime” referred to evolved, just as terms like “cancel culture” and “critical race theory” have today, such that in the early 20th century, ragtime was often experienced less as piano compositions than as catchy little pop tunes, most resonantly as sung onstage. His written pieces were, in their way, standing admonitions to players more inclined to approach piano ragtime as sport, according to how fast and fancily they could bang it out. Though his composition “Maple Leaf Rag” is widely known - even people who don’t know the title, or who wrote it, recognize the melody - and over time, at least, the sheet music was a huge seller, Joplin’s pieces were often too hard for the average pianist to play. He blended Black American syncopated rhythms and bluesy harmonies with European-derived classical and semiclassical forms, such as marches and waltzes, to create a new music shining with indigenous authenticity and refinement. He was raised in and around Texarkana, Texas, at turns made a living as a cornet player and a singer, and eventually published the best ragtime piano pieces of his era. ![]() The story of this Black master of the ragtime genre can seem like one that never got far beyond the starting gate and ended with a sad decrescendo. Friday is the anniversary of Scott Joplin’s death in 1917. ![]()
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