Word: joplin
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...there an American composer more important, more familiar and yet more obscure than Scott Joplin? His signature tune, The Maple Leaf Rag (1899), was the first piece of sheet music in America to sell a million copies, and after the 1973 release of the film The Sting and its accompanying soundtrack, his rag The Entertainer was heard constantly all over the country. And yet this genius, whose ambition it was to merge white European classical forms with black American rhythms and harmonies, has remained a shadowy historical figure, a mysterious creature of the late 19th century urban demimonde...
...years the standard reference work on Joplin's life was They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, a 1950 study based largely on interviews with surviving original ragtimers. But oral history is necessarily flawed, since recollection fails with the passage of years, and a more scholarly, rigorous treatment was called for. Now comes King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era by ragtime scholar Edward A. Berlin (Oxford; 334 pages; $25); it immediately supplants the earlier book as the most accurate and informative Joplin biography...
Berlin has a sure grasp of the ragtime era; his earlier Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History is an exemplary scholarly monograph on a complicated subject. The Joplin biography is equally formidable in its research. Combing census records, city directories and newspaper files across the Midwest, Berlin follows in detail Joplin's travels from his birthplace near Texarkana, Texas (his father Giles was a freed slave), through the bandstands and bordellos of the Mississippi to Tin Pan Alley, the budding popular-music scene in New York City. Berlin then recounts Joplin's syphilis-induced descent into madness, a deterioration that...
...author gives equally detailed attention to Joplin's music -- the early parlor songs, the magnificent piano rags, the waltzes and marches and Treemonisha, his great last work. Berlin's analysis is always illuminating and expert; however, nonmusical readers may have trouble following his arguments, illustrated as they are by plentiful examples from scores. There are tantalizing references to such lost works as a symphony, a piano concerto and the opera A Guest of Honor, which was registered for copyright in 1903, although no copy of the score is known to exist...
...ever an American composer was worthy of such thorough examination, surely Joplin is. His great accomplishment was to refine and perfect a kind of protojazz called ragtime. He did not invent it: black musicians along the Mississippi had long been syncopating, or "ragging," the rhythm of such forms as the march and the two-step, and Joplin was not even the first to publish a rag. But in his hands the nascent genre was quickly transformed into something worthy of the concert hall. Joplin's rags, beginning with the sprightly Original Rags and ending with the autumnal, resigned Magnetic...