Word: joplin
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...like last week's, will be underwritten by private foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts and researched by Music Historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence, whose mania for musical Americana has resulted in the publication of the complete music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and of Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin (TIME, Feb. 7). With such continued aid and support, says Hill, "we want to do a dozen or more programs like this one. Even that would barely scratch the surface...
...Joplin's libretto has a big subject (how the Negro can improve himself) but an oversimplified solution (education). Its language is embarrassingly laden with darky dialect ("Aunt Dinah has blowed de horn,/And we'll go home to stay until dawn"). There are enough voodoo heavies, cavorting bears and right-thinking preachers to tax any producer's ingenuity...
...Atlanta, Director Katherine Dunham treated Treemonisha as the period piece it is but did little more than use it as a frame for big dance scenes. These had a scalp-tingling power. The gorgeous A Real Slow Drag ended the opera with a ceremonious eroticism that nearly matched Joplin's music. Alpha Floyd, in the title role of a foundling whose book learning propels her into civic leadership, produced a bright, reedy soprano but had stiff presence. Simon Estes, as Treemonisha's father Ned, draped Joplin's curvaceous melodies in rolling voluminous sound. But with surprisingly lackluster...
Still, it was a far cry from the only hearing that Treemonisha received during Joplin's lifetime-a run-through in a Harlem rehearsal hall. The black listeners in the hall did not like it. Ragtime Scholar Rudi Blesh speculates that they "were sophisticated enough to reject their folk past, but not sufficiently to relish a return to it in art." The composer was forced to publish the work at his own expense...
Torn Cloth. To Joplin, who was obsessed with opera, Treemonisha's failure meant the failure of his whole life. Born in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas, the son of an ex-slave, Joplin discovered the piano at age seven. His self-taught playing and improvising attracted so much attention that a local piano teacher waived his usual fees and took the prodigy in hand. After Joplin's mother died, the youngster had a falling out with his father and at 14 left home to take up the life of a honky-tonk pianist. He wandered to St. Louis, Chicago...