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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Scott Joplin “Ragtime” music takes its name from the ragged, syncopated rhythms that are the hallmark of this style. Ragtime music flourished between 1896 and 1918 and was written for the piano, bands, and singers by Scott Joplin, Joseph F. Lamb, and many other composers of popular music. Ragtime dances developed as well. In the years following World War I, though, ragtime lost its popularity to Dixieland and then other styles of jazz. After decades of neglect, a resurgence of interest in ragtime music began in the 1940s with concerts and recordings by the Yerba Buena Jass Band. Interest intensified in the 1960s. Composer William Bolcom became interested in Joplin’s music after sharing an office with jazz advocate and Circle Records owner Rudi Blesh. Bolcom played some ragtime at a party, and musicologist Joshua Rifkin was so enthralled that he learned enough pieces to record an album for the Nonesuch label. A few years later, composer Gunther Schuller received a copy of Fifteen Standard High Class Rags (generally known as “The Red Back Book”) from musicologist Vera Lawrence, who had been introduced to Joplin’s music by Bolcom. Schuller was so taken by these band arrangements of Joplin rags that he organized the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble and recorded the music for the Angel label. This recording, coming from the stereo of movie director George Roy Hill’s son, led Hill to choose Joplin’s music for the film The Sting. Marvin Hamlisch’s adaptations of Joplin’s music for The Sting won the Academy Award for best film score and was one of the top ten popular albums of 1974. This string of occurrences brought Joplin a worldwide fame that he did not experience during his lifetime. Joplin was born into a rural family on the Texas/Arkansas border in the tough times following the Civil War. His father had been born a slave in North Carolina and his mother had been born free in Kentucky. 1880 census records show the family living in Texarkana, Texas, where Joplin’s father was listed as a laborer and his mother as a domestic. The Joplin family was musical, and three of the six children in the family became entertainers. Scott was reportedly a serious youngster interested in school who developed his musical talents first with his parents and then with a series of local music teachers. His final teacher in Texarkana was a German immigrant named Julius Weiss. Weiss is generally credited with giving Joplin an understanding of and interest in the European musical tradition. Joplin started working as a professional musician as a teenager, performing in a vocal quartet that included one of his brothers and playing piano for dances. As a traveling musician, he made his way across the middle of the country to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and through St. Louis. Eventually, he settled in Sedalia, Missouri. Sedalia in the 1880s was a busy town in the middle of the state. It was a county seat with a bustling economy and plenty of entertainment for both its black and white communities. Sedalia was also the home of George R. Smith College, a small liberal-arts institution founded for “the moral and intellectual culture of the colored people of the west,” where Joplin refined his understanding of musical composition. Joplin wrote his most popular piece, the Maple Leaf Rag, in Sedalia and it was published by local music store owner, John Stark. Stark publicized the music and touted its composer as the “King of Ragtime Writers.” The rarity of a royalty clause in the publishing contract for Maple Leaf Rag let Joplin live fairly well as a performer and composer. He also took on piano students from time to time and wrote a method-book based on how he performed his own music. Joplin moved to St. Louis in 1900, toured the Midwest vaudeville circuit for several years, and arrived in New York City in the summer of 1907. During his final decade he worked to maintain his reputation and popular career while also trying to bring the opera Treemonisha to the stage. Had he lived, America may have counted a native son of African ancestory as its first great 20 th century composer. By 1917, ragtime was quickly being supplanted by Dixieland in the country’s dance halls, and it is not a wild supposition that Joplin could have simply followed his inclination into the concert hall. As it was, Scott Joplin left us a very strong catalog of music — pieces that are certainly worthy of the scholarly interest that sparked the revival discussed above. Joplin’s most famous composition was the Maple Leaf Rag. He probably composed the piece by 1898, and it was published in 1899. How the music came to the attention of publisher John Stark is the subject of quite a few contradictory stories, but its publication secured the finances of both composer and publisher. Speculation has the title coming from Sedalia’s Maple Leaf Club, the simple fact that the city’s streets were prominently lined with maple trees, or the railway that was known as “The Maple Leaf Route.” The music shows a marked development to the piano style Joplin had adopted. While earlier ragtime compositions, including those by Joplin, would feature a syncopated melody over a rollicking bass line, the syncopated rhythm in Maple Leaf is structurally supported by Joplin’s understanding of harmony and voice-leading so that the composition swings as a whole. Maple Leaf Rag boasts four contrasting strains, where the norm had been three, and again we hear Joplin’s skill in the movement of the inner voices. Of particular interest is the chromatic descent of a fourth that occurs in the fourth strain — a harmonic feature that would become a signature motif for Joplin. Thousands of pianists picked up Maple Leaf Rag within a couple of years of its publication and its popularity changed how subsequent pieces in the style came to sound. The Ragtime Dance is an excerpt from Joplin’s first attempt to write music for stage entertainment, in this case a ballet that was also titled The Ragtime Dance. His friend, Arthur Marshall, remembered Joplin organizing a “drama company,” featuring Scott’s brother Will Joplin (a prize-winning dancer), and renting the local opera house in Sedalia for a performance. Joplin’s concept was based on his observation of dances held at local black clubs where white residents of the town would come and watch. He wrote a piece for a narrator, followed by several popular-style dances: a rag, cake walk, slow drag, World’s Fair dance, etc. The production of the piece was rigorously rehearsed but failed to impress Stark enough to publish it. At the urging of his daughter, Stark did publish The Ragtime Dance in 1902 but it did not sell well, probably because of its protracted length. The Easy Winners dates from 1901. This ragtime two-step was originally self-published by Joplin, but he contracted initially with a St. Louis music company for distribution before returning to Stark, who published the piece again in 1908. The cover illustration for the sheet music features middle-class white athletes engaged in baseball, football, horseracing, and sailing; part of Joplin and Stark’s marketing plan for the piece. The music itself shows a marked complexity and engaging development through the four strains. Again, we should listen for the downward movement of a fourth. In this piece, Joplin based the entire harmonic movement of the third strain on completing this motion. There are few pop pieces that have had the impact The Entertainer had in its revival in the mid-1970s. The piece was also quite popular when it was published in 1902. Building from a deceptively simple opening strain it was touted as “probably the best and most euphonious of [ Joplin’s] latter-day compositions.” John Stark’s advertising copy for The Entertainer provides its most engaging description:
The waltz Bethena seems to have come out of a personal loss in Joplin’s life. Published in 1905, it was the first music Joplin sent for copyright following the death of his first wife, Freddie. The couple had married in June of 1904. Freddie died of pneumonia just ten weeks later at the age of 20. Edward Berlin has speculated that while there may have been a woman named Bethena, the achingly beautiful waltz is probably a rememberance of Freddie. As with The Entertainer, the piece builds out of a simple opening phrase. In Bethena, however, the dissonance inherent at the very beginning marks the character of the whole piece. Joplin spent the end of his life writing his opera Treemonisha and trying to bring it to the stage. He came to New York in July, 1907, with no plans to make it his permanent home, but business opportunities and a new relationship led him to settle in Harlem. Joplin’s ambition to write serious theater music that would transcend vaudeville (and certainly be worlds away from the minstrel show) was well-known among his friends. He finished the first version of his opera in 1910. None of his usual publishers were interested in the piece, so he decided to publish it himself as a score for piano and voices in May, 1911. While the music for Treemonisha is universally praised, critics have expressed the wish that Joplin would have consulted with any of his dramatically-gifted friends to help him create a more dynamic libretto. There are some interesting aspects to the book, however. Treemonisha is the foster daughter of working rural folks in a little farming community outside of Texarkana in 1884. She was educated by a local white woman and, at 18, is ready to lead her community out of ignorance and superstition. The “conjurors” in the village, who make their living selling “bags of luck” are enraged by Treemonisha. They capture her and almost throw her into a nest of wasps, but she is rescued at the last moment by an older man who had been her student, Remus. Treemonisha asks for forgiveness for the conjurers and, in the end, the townsfolk recognize her as their leader and declare their willingness to “march onward” with her to a better life. Focusing on Joplin’s belief that basic education was the key to success for his people, the opera is a strong allegory. The focus is underlined by Joplin’s use of standard English for Treemonisha and Remus and dialect for the other characters, most notably the conjurers. Joplin played selections from the opera whenever he was in any gathering and left copies of the score with those he felt might help get it on the stage. He received a very complimentary (if condescending) review from the American Musician and Art Journal: Scott Joplin has not been influenced by his musical studies or by foreign schools. He has created an original type of music in which he employs syncopation in a most artistic and original manner. It is in no sense rag-time, but of that peculiar quality of rhythm which Dvořák used so successfully in the “ New World” symphony. The composer has constantly kept in mind his characters and their purpose, and has written music in keeping with his libretto. To date there is no record of even the slightest tendency toward the fashioning of the real American opera, and although this work just completed by one of the Ethiopian race will hardly be accepted as a typical American opera for obvious reasons, nevertheless none can deny that it serves as an opening wedge, since it is in every respect indigenous. Its production would prove an interesting and potent achievement, and it is to be hoped that sooner or later it will be thus honored. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Joplin organized a company to perform the opera in Atlantic City in September of 1911, but the plans fell through. Instead, Joplin gave an informal performance in Harlem with less than 20 people in attendance. Arrangements for a production in New Jersey in 1913 also failed. He gained some success by releasing parts of the opera separately, notably the finale and the ballet from the second act known as “Dance of the Bears,” but he never saw a complete professional staging of his masterwork. The opera received its world premiere on January 28, 1972, at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center in a version edited by William Bolcom and orchestrated by T. J. Anderson. 2006 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth
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