Ragtime Aperitif Recital at the Savile Club, July 2023
Scott Joplin (1868-1917), ‘King of Ragtime’, composed more than 40 piano works, a ragtime ballet and two operas. His first published piece, Maple Leaf Rag became the genre's defining hit. Joplin survived on the royalties, but never managed repeat its success.
His father was a railway labourer in Texarkana, Texas. Scott received piano lessons as a boy, and briefly joined his father on the railroad, before quitting to travel the South as an itinerant musician. In 1885 he made his way to St Louis, where he was employed as pianist in ‘Honest John’ Turpin’s Silver Dollar Saloon (brother & business partner of composer Tom Turpin). He then headed for the Chicago 1893 World Fair - an event considered by cradle of ragtime, before settling in Sedalia, Missouri, where he studied at the George R Smith College-one of a network of black music colleges-and taught future ragtime composers including Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden. Here Joplin had a regular gig at The Williams Brothers Saloon, where he was known as ‘the entertainer’, and whose private Maple Leaf Club gave its name to his first publication which brought him fame. Thanks to his enlightened publisher, John Stark, who paid Joplin royalties on his sales-then very unusual, especially for a black composer-he moved to St. Louis, where he could afford to take more time composing and teaching.
The title Maple Leaf Rag derives from a specific establishment of the type euphemistically known as a ‘gentleman’s sporting house’. I say more below about this below; but it is probable that Joplin acquired the syphilis that was to kill him from the brothel pianist’s occupational hazard. And like poor Schubert he too was probably unaware of having contracted it.
Always ambitious, both musically and in terms of honouring his racial background, the first years of the 20thC saw Joplin at the height of his success. He composed an opera A Guest of Honor in 1903 which had just begun a national tour when catastrophe struck: all the takings were stolen, the tour collapsed and in the aftermath Joplin lost all his possessions, including the score for the opera, which has never been found. Worse was to come: his first marriage, a reportedly ‘disastrous’ relationship, ended when their baby died in 1904. He married again the following year, but his second wife died of pneumonia weeks later.
At a low ebb, in 1907 Joplin moved to New York City hoping to find a producer for his second opera, Treemonisha, in which he went beyond the limitations of the musical form that had brought him fame but little reward. Alas the public was not ready for it, and his attempts to mount Treemonisha were an unhappy catalog of accidents and unfulfilled promises.
Moreover, musical fashion had moved on and a new style of swung music emerged from New Orleans, that came to be known variously as Blues or Jass/Jazz or Dixieland - which superseded the marching rhythms of Ragtime. In 1916, Joplin succumbed to dementia as a result of neurosyphilis, and was placed in a mental asylum where he died a year later at the age of 48. Altho by the virus had been identified 10 years earlier, treatments were not then available.
Joplin's music was rediscovered in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award-winning 1972 film The Sting, which anachronistically featured several of Joplin's compositions in a 1930s setting, most notably The Entertainer, which had been entirely overlooked when it was published, but has since become known as his signature work. In consequence of the vogue, Treemonisha was finally produced, and Joplin awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Series curated and filmed by Michael Maxwell Steer
Негізгі бет Michæl Maxwell Steer - The Entertainer (Joplin)
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