![]() ![]() ![]() I’m featuring here three recordings of the Maple Leaf Rag-it is only three minutes long, so listening to all three in one sitting is possible. Joplin had strict self-imposed rules about tempo, though: “It is never right to play ragtime fast.” If you have heard much ragtime, you may have noticed the tempo discrepancies among pianists who play it-some playing middle-of-the-road tempos and others playing quite fast. Joplin called this “the swing”: Play slowly until you catch “the swing,” he said. Played correctly, ragtime induces the listener to actually physically move-an intended affect. Ragtime pieces were as symmetrical as any Sousa march: 16 bars in a rondo kind of pattern: ABACA, etc. ![]() It relies on a predominant left hand part which gives strong emphasis to the 1st and 3rd beats (in 4/4 time) with a syncopated melody in the right hand which places its strong emphases in between the LH beats. Ragtime, the style for which Joplin is given credit as being its creator-is actually very simple. He was admitted into a mental institution in 1917, and died three months later at the age of 48. In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia, as a result of contracting syphilis. Tremonisha-actually his second opera, the first one being lost-was not a success in 1915. But taking the form in which excelled-ragtime-and extrapolating operatic material from it was a steep hill to climb. Joplin moved to New York in 1907, hoping to be taken seriously as an opera composer. Louis, and became a beacon there for young and aspiring (and African-American) musicians. In 1899, the publication of his Maple Leaf Rag brought him national fame. He made his way to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, playing his new rags and becoming a sensation. His strong musical inclinations, though, led him to leave Arkansas and travel all over the South as an itinerant musician when he was 20. His family, including himself, were railroad workers. Joplin was born and raised in Texarkana, Arkansas. And they in turn developed into something fundamental to many jazz pianists-stride–and following that, swing. Joplin, who lived from 1868-1917 is, in textbooks, defined by the style in which he wrote. His life and works often intersect in the histories of African-American composers-at or near the beginning of a chronological listing-and of jazz-again, at the very beginning. Joplin’s “heyday” would have been the 1890’s. I’m posting today, though, not The Entertainer, but the work that put Joplin’s name on the map, so to speak, in his own time-the Maple Leaf Rag. Joshua Rifkin (whose name you may remember from my posting of Judy Collins, MIL #318) recorded two Grammy-nominated best-selling albums of Scott Joplin rags in the 1970’s-they were Nonesuch Records first million sellers, and they went just as far as The Sting did in creating a renewed interest in Scott Joplin and ragtime. Rags were actually no longer being played in the 1930’s.īut, “The Entertainer” was such a huge hit that it sparked a revival of interest in ragtime, that progenitor of the ultimately huge blossoming of jazz-the only indigenous music of the United States. It is somewhat ironic that The Sting was set in the 1930’s, a full generation after Joplin’s music would have been popular. That was where I first heard Joplin-mistaking his music, as I’m sure many others did, as the work of Hamlisch. The piece became so ubiquitously played on radio that it spent weeks at the top of the charts in 1974. I would guess that most Americans who know any Scott Joplin at all know him from Marvin Hamlisch’s arrangement of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” which was featured in the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie, The Sting. ![]()
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