12/31/2023 0 Comments Classic ragtime piano![]() ![]() In 2020, he has nearly 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, where one of his most popular tracks is an arrangement by violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman of ‘The Ragtime Dance’ for violin. Joplin died in a mental facility, convinced he had failed at his goal – to become an African American composer of “serious music”. There are no existing manuscripts in his hand, and only three photographs of him have survived. We have little left of the man behind the music. Then in 1973, came Academy Award-winning film The Sting, that used several of Joplin’s compositions including ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Solace’. His untimely death, caused by syphilis which descended into dementia, marked the end of ragtime and a sad lapse in interest around his music.īut his compositions were rediscovered and had a second wave of popularity in the early 1970s, when Joshua Rifkin released an extremely successful album of his pieces. ![]() Treemonisha: Overture (Scott Joplin) Joplin’s legacy Read more: Meet George Walker, the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music > “He found it very difficult to get his work performed.” “Joplin was way ahead of his time,” Henry adds. He writes for The Times: “What is great about Treemonisha is that the heroine does not die like most classical leading ladies – by the knife, by poison or yearning for a man – but becomes a leader of the community. Its moral message is education as a fundamental right for all African Americans.Ĭomedian Lenny Henry recently championed the opera in a documentary on forgotten Black classical composers. The opera, a celebration of African American culture, combines the Romanticism of the early 20th century with Black folk song tradition. A music historian at the time called the performance a “semimiracle”. Treemonisha, sometimes erroneously referred to as a “ragtime opera”, was never staged during Joplin’s lifetime – only being confirmed in its entirety in 1972, by the Houston Grand Opera. But he also wrote two operas, one – Treemonisha (1911) – for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. History has remembered Joplin as the “ragtime guy”. Better a machine than nothing, and so it remains after a hundred years.Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer' played on a 1915 piano Joplin’s operas Ragtime devotees often get a nostalgic buzz from piano rolls, and the best way for others to approach the no-dynamic, no-touch sound is to reflect that classic ragtime was often heard on player pianos if at all. This is truly great music, and it is painful to realize that all of Scott’s later #work is lost. Not even Joplin was better at combining sophisticated harmony and development with pure Missouri folksong. This reissue was, if memory serves, the first record devoted to Scott’s work, and the grace and beauty of ragtime are on display on every track. Modern jazz composers can learn as much from ragtime as classical composers can from Bach it can teach serious listeners as much about the real American spirit as Bartok can about the Slavic. It is the first body of serious Afro-American composition. ![]() The truth about this music is too important for such trivialization. ![]() A revival that should have led to Jelly Roll Morton led where all roads lead in America, to Hollywood. The classical aspects of Joplin’s rags were over-emphasized and such important projects as recording the oeuvres of the other two of ragtime’s “big three,” James Scott and Joe Lamb, wound up in the hands of pianists who sounded as if they had but brief acquaintance with the music. during the ’70s was largely just another turn of the same screw. It is bad enough that the work of our great ragtime composers was treated as a passing fancy during their lifetimes by now it is apparent that the revival of Joplin et al. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |