Ragtime scott joplin professional#

‘It has throttled and silenced those who oppose syncopations. ‘ The Maple Leaf Rag marks an era in musical composition,’ Stark wrote, praising the music of his leading composer. It was, for many years, also his meal ticket, thanks to the fact that he had negotiated a very favourable royalty arrangement with a Sedalia publisher, John Stark. Possibly connected to Sedalia’s Maple Leaf Club, a social gathering place for African-Americans, The Maple Leaf Rag (which appeared in Pianist No 11) became his calling card. Some 500,000 copies of the sheet music were sold in the ten years after its first publication. The Maple Leaf Rag (1899) is probably Joplin’s most famous rag. And as a performing musician, he drew inspiration from other performers and musical styles: marches, cakewalks and perhaps even Brahms via his teacher Weiss.

Not all of Joplin’s early pieces were in the syncopated style – titles include Combination March and Harmony Club Waltz. The result was music that was great for both listening and dancing, giving the twostep liveliness and agility.’

‘Their tunes were rendered in the syncopated “ragged” style that was its trademark. ‘Ragtime’s immediate roots were in the minstrel music and cakewalk tunes that depicted the simple joys of contented slaves, a fiction that white America clung to long after the Civil War,’ writes Ray Argyle in Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime. In the 20-year period after the Fair, Joplin’s compositions such as The Maple Leaf Rag would bring ragtime to its highest level of art. But he attracted good audiences, and the Fair brought ragtime to wider public attention.

Instead they played in saloons and restaurants outside of the fairgrounds. With his Texas Medley Quartette, Joplin played at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 – or rather, he would have played there, but few African-Americans were allowed to play inside the Fair. It’s important to remember Joplin was born just a few years after the end of the US Civil War, when, despite the official emancipation of the slaves, conservative forces were doing their best to reinstate the status quo that kept African-Americans at the very bottom of the social ladder. He later attended the George R Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, making him quite well educated for an African-American of his time. The teenaged Joplin formed the Texas Medley Quartette and soon was performing at dances, events, meetings and weddings. The youngster’s musical abilities caught the attention of Julian Weiss, a German-born music teacher, who took him under his wing, tutoring him in basic musicianship and composition, and giving him an appreciation of opera and art. The family later moved to Texarkana, where Florence was employed as a domestic cleaner, and it’s thought Scott first played the piano at the home of one of her employers. Giles played violin and Florence the banjo. Life was not easy – ‘a hardscrabble existence on barren Texas scrubland’ in the words of one biographer – yet there was still joy to be had in the Joplin family’s music making. What is known is that his mother, Florence, hailed from Kentucky, while his father, Giles, a former slave, came from North Carolina. Recent biographers agree that Joplin was born near Marshall, Texas, probably in 1867, but certainly not on 24 November 1868, the usual date given. Tracing the life of the ‘King of Ragtime’ has challenged biographers – the paper trail, beyond newspaper accounts of his achievements and some official documents, is thin.

The Entertainer is one of the most well-known ragtime pieces in history. Joplin, who died in 1916, would have been delighted by all the attention. In 1983, Joplin’s face appeared on a US postage stamp. Scott Joplin, a film about the composer’s life, came out in 1977, while choreographer Kenneth MacMillan used Joplin’s music as the score to his 1974 ballet Elite Syncopations (recently revived at the Birmingham Royal Ballet).

Ragtime scott joplin professional#

Amateur and professional pianists alike discovered ragtime, adding such gems as The Entertainer and The Maple Leaf Rag to their repertoire. The Sting arrived on the wave of a major ragtime revival. Marvin Hamlisch won an Academy Award for his arranging efforts, however, the real credit must go to the composer, Scott Joplin – ‘The King of Ragtime’. Our impression of ragtime has also been shaped by the use of rags in the soundtrack of the hugely successful 1973 film, The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Think of ‘ragtime’ and your first mental image might be of a man with a twirly moustache, wearing a boater hat and a striped shirt with braces, who’s sitting at an upright piano and pounding out a jaunty rag.įrom our vantage point, more than 100 years later, ragtime seems like the innocent music of an almost comically innocent age.