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Scott Joplin
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Scott Joplin (between June 1867 and January 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American musician and composer of ragtime music. He remains the best-known ragtime figure and is regarded as one of the three most important composers of classic ragtime, along with James Scott and Joseph Lamb. His music enjoyed a considerable resurgence of popularity and critical respect in the 1970s, especially for his most famous composition, "The Entertainer" which was featured as the main theme in the 1973 film The Sting.
t Joplin, the second of six children, was born in eastern Texas, near Linden, to Florence Givins and Jiles Joplin.
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Scott Joplin (between June 1867 and January 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American musician and composer of ragtime music. He remains the best-known ragtime figure and is regarded as one of the three most important composers of classic ragtime, along with James Scott and Joseph Lamb. His music enjoyed a considerable resurgence of popularity and critical respect in the 1970s, especially for his most famous composition, "The Entertainer" which was featured as the main theme in the 1973 film The Sting.
Early years
Scott Joplin, the second of six children, was born in eastern Texas, near Linden, to Florence Givins and Jiles Joplin. November 24, 1868 has been assumed as the correct birth date of Scott Joplin, but modern research by ragtime historian Ed Berlin has revealed this is almost certainly inaccurate. The 1870 census lists Scott, age 2, as the son of Jiles and Florence Joplin. The exact location of his birth is uncertain.
After 1871, the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas, and Scott's mother cleaned houses so Scott could have a place to practice his music. By 1882 his mother had purchased a piano. Showing musical ability at an early age, the young Joplin received free piano lessons from a German music teacher, Julius Weiss, who gave him a well rounded knowledge of classical music form, which would serve him well in later years and fuel his ambition to create a "classical" form of ragtime.
Joplin had opportunities to perform in the East Texas town where he lived. Texarkana had several lodges, and these halls would be turned over to young people for dancing after about 10:00 PM, and polkas, schottisches, waltzes, and two-steps were played. Joplin himself played in these dance halls, where he heard popular tunes played in a syncopated style. One very popular tune was "The Banjo" by composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
By the late 1880s, Scott Joplin had left home to start a life of his own. He may have joined or formed various quartets and other musical groups and traveled around the Midwest to sing. In the Queen City Concert Band, he played first cornet. After organizing the Texas Medley Quartette (actually an octet) with his brothers Robert and Will, he toured the East and Midwest, including Syracuse, New York where he published his first piece, "Please Say You Will". He was also part of a minstrel troupe in Texarkana about 1891. At the 1893 World's Fair, in Chicago, Illinois, he heard the latest music, including the concert band of John Phillip Sousa, who played there daily. He would later further his musical education by attending George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, studying music theory, harmony, and composition.
Despite all his traveling, Joplin's home was in Sedalia, to which he moved in 1894, working as a pianist in the Maple Leaf and the Black 400, social clubs for "respectable [black] gentlemen". In 1895, Joplin was in Syracuse, selling two songs, "Please Say You Will" and "A Picture of Her Face".
Success
By the summer of 1899, Joplin had sold six pieces for the piano. Of the six, only "Original Rags", a compilation of existing melodies that he wrote collaboratively, is a ragtime piece. The other five were "Please Say You Will", "A Picture of Her Face", two marches, and a waltz.
On August 10, 1899, Joplin sold what would become one of his most famous pieces, "Maple Leaf Rag", to John Stark & Son, a Sedalia music publisher. Joplin received a one-cent royalty for each copy and ten free copies for his own use, as well as an advance. It has been estimated that Joplin made $360 per year on this piece in his lifetime.
Becoming the first instrumental to sell over one million copies,"Maple Leaf Rag" put Joplin to the top of the list of ragtime performers and moved ragtime into a popular musical form.
With a growing national reputation based on the success of "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in early 1900 with his new wife, Belle. Belle was a sister-in-law of Scott Hayden, who collaborated with Joplin in the composition of four rags. While living in St. Louis from 1900 to 1903, he produced some of his best-known works, "The Entertainer", "Elite Syncopations", "March Majestic", and "Ragtime Dance".
In June 1904, Joplin married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, the young woman to whom he had dedicated "The Chrysanthemum" (1904). She died on September 10, 1904 of complications resulting from a cold, ten weeks after their wedding. Joplin's first work copyrighted after Freddie's death, "Bethena" (1905), is a very sad, musically complex ragtime waltz.
In 1907 Scott Joplin moved to New York City, where he met Lottie Stokes, whom he married in 1909. Despite months of faltering, Joplin continued writing and publishing. During this period, he produced the opera Treemonisha; the score to his earlier ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor, is lost. Treemonisha was never fully staged during Joplin's lifetime, and its sole performance was a concert read-through with piano in 1915 at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, New York City, funded by Joplin himself. One of Joplin's friends, Sam Patterson, described this performance as "thin and unconvincing, little better than a rehearsal... its special quality (would have been) lost on the typical Harlem audience (that was) sophisticated enough to reject their folk past but not sufficiently so to relish a return to it".
In 1913, Scott and Lottie formed the Scott Joplin Music Company, which published his "Magnetic Rag."
Joplin as a performer
It is unclear today how advanced Joplin's skills as a pianist were. In 1898, a newspaper in Sedalia referred to him as "one of the best pianists in the world", and in 1911 a New York-based music magazine spoke in glowing terms of Joplin's 'musicianly way' of playing ragtime. However, in St. Louis, opinions differed. Arthur Marshall, a good friend and student of Joplin, said "he played slowly, but exceedingly good..had an execution that you would stand back and listen and wonder how he got to do that stuff". Joe Jordan, another famous ragtime musician, said that although he never played anything other than his own pieces, he did play them well. However, Jordan is also on record as describing Joplin's playing as reminding him of a "stationary Indian". Sam Patterson said Joplin "never played well" and Artie Matthews recalled the delight the Saint Louis players took in outplaying Joplin with his own music. John Stark's own son stated that Joplin was a rather mediocre pianist and that he composed on paper, rather than at the piano. One student of Joplin's recalled in later years he played slowly and methodically, and regularly reminded the student to place a strong accent on the first beat of each measure.
Researcher Edward Berlin theorizes that by the time Joplin reached St Louis, he was already beginning to suffer the physical effects of syphilis, which would take his life in 1917. One of the symptoms, which can manifest up to 20 years prior to death, is discoordination of the fingers. This may explain the differences in opinion of those observing Joplin's playing in the late 1890s and in the early 1910s. In the 1976 TV series All You Need is Love, Eubie Blake recalled listening to a later Joplin performance and was shocked as he performed the "Maple Leaf Rag".
While Joplin never made an audio recording, he did record seven piano rolls in 1916; "Maple Leaf Rag" (for Connorized and Aeolian companies), "Something Doing," "Magnetic Rag," "Ole Miss Rag," "Weeping Willow" and "Pleasant Moments - Ragtime Waltz" (all for Connorized). These are the only records of his playing we have, and are interesting for the embellishments added by Joplin to his Connorized performances, although studying other Connorized rolls of that era reveals they may well have been added during the production process by staff artists, rather than Joplin himself. The roll of "Pleasant Moments" was thought lost until August 2006, when a piano roll collector in New Zealand discovered a surviving copy. It has been claimed that the uneven nature of some of Joplin's piano rolls, such as one of the recordings of "Maple Leaf Rag" mentioned above, documented the extent of Joplin's physical deterioration due to syphilis. A comparison of the two "Maple Leaf Rag" player-piano rolls made by Joplin in 1916, one in April the other in June, has been described as "... shocking. The second version is disorganized and completely distressing to hear." While the irregularities may also be due to the primitive technology used to record the rolls, rolls recorded by other artists for the same company around the same time are noticeably smoother.
Illness
Joplin wanted to experiment further with compositions like Treemonisha, but by 1916 he was suffering from the effects of terminal syphilis. He suffered later from dementia, paranoia, paralysis and other symptoms.
In mid-January 1917 Joplin was hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital in New York City, and friends recounted that he would have bursts of lucidity in which he would jot down lines of music hurriedly before relapsing. Joplin died there on April 1 1917. Joplin was 49 or 50 years of age (his exact birthdate is unknown).
Joplin's death did not make the headlines for two reasons: Ragtime was quickly losing ground to jazz and the United States would enter World War I within days. He was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the Astoria section of Queens. It was years before a marker was placed at the site.
In 1947, Lottie Joplin (Joplin's third wife) had a photograph sent to Brun Campbell, titled Joplin's Piano. Whether or not the piano in the picture actually was one of Joplin's has never been determined, but in 1997, Reginald Robinson noticed that a page of handwritten manuscript on the piano in the photograph was a tune almost certainly composed by Joplin, but which nobody had ever heard before, since no one had ever examined the photograph in such detail. The fragment's style would suggest a composition date even later than Magnetic Rag (1914), being highly lyrical and containing a section in a minor key, as in Magnetic Rag. The photograph indicates page two of the manuscript, indicating the end of the A section and the beginning of the B section.
Joplin's musical papers, including unpublished manuscripts, were willed to Joplin's friend and the executor of his will, musician and composer Wilbur Sweatman. Sweatman took care of these papers and generously shared access to them to those who inquired. However, these were unfortunately few, since Joplin's music had come to be considered passé. After Sweatman's death in 1961 the papers were last known to go into storage during a legal battle among Sweatman's heirs; their current location is not known, nor even if they still exist.
There was, however, another important find in 1971: a piano roll of the lost "Silver Swan Rag," manufactured sometime around 1914. It had not been published in sheet-music form in Joplin's lifetime. Before this, his only posthumously published piece had been "Reflection Rag," published by Stark in 1917 from an older manuscript he'd kept back. Almost all Joplin scholars agree that the piece is a genuine Joplin composition.
Legacy and revival
After his death, Joplin's music and ragtime in general waned in popularity as new forms of musical styles, such as jazz and novelty piano, emerged. However, a number of revivals of ragtime have occurred since. Scott Joplin created many different styles of ragtime and made it what it is today.
In 1970, Joplin was inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, by the National Academy of Popular Music.
In the early 1940s, many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and released ragtime recordings on 78 RPM records. In 1970, Joshua Rifkin released a Grammy-nominated recording of Joplin's rags on the classical label Nonesuch. In 1972, Joplin's opera Treemonisha was finally staged at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Marvin Hamlisch's adaptation of the Joplin rag "The Entertainer," featured in the Oscar-winning film The Sting, reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart in 1974. (The use of ragtime in The Sting was actually an anachronism, as the film was set in the 1930s, well past the peak of the ragtime era.)
In 1974 for the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan created Elite Syncopations, a ballet based on tunes by Joplin, Max Morath and others. The same year saw the premiere by the Los Angeles Ballet of Red Back Book, choreographed by John Clifford to Joplin rags from the collection of the same name, including both solo piano performances and arrangements for full orchestra.
Scott Joplin was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music. A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame was placed in his honor. Motown Productions produced a Scott Joplin biographical film starring Billy Dee Williams as Joplin, released by Universal Pictures in 1977.
In 1983, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp of the composer as part of its Black Heritage commemorative series.
A Scott Joplin festival takes place each spring in Sedalia. Ragtime players from around the globe perform at numerous locations throughout the town. At the site of the Maple Leaf club, everyone who would like to can sign up to take a turn playing.
In 2002, a collection of Scott Joplin's own performances recorded on piano rolls in the 1900s was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. The board selects songs in an annual basis that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Joplin's music
Even at the time of publication, Joplin's publisher John Stark was claiming that the rags had obtained classical status, and "lifted ragtime from its low estate and lined it up with Beethoven and Bach".. Later critics also saw merit in Joplin's compositions:
He combined the traditions of Afro-American folk music with nineteenth-century European romanticism; he collected the black Midwestern Folk rag ideas as raw material for the creation of original strains. Thus, his rags are the most heavily pentatonic, with liberal use of blue notes and other outstanding features that characterize black folk music. In this creative synthesis, . . . the traditional march became the dominant form, and the result was a new art form, the Classic rag – a unique conception which paradoxically both forged the way for early serious ragtime composition, and, at the same time, developed along insular lines, away from most other ragtime playing and composing.
It is sometimes claimed that ragtime is one of the earliest forms of jazz.
A note on tempo
Joplin left little doubt as to how his compositions should be performed and he explicitly wrote in many of his scores performance notes warning the pianist not to play the work too fast. However, according to Joplin biographer Rudi Blesh, Joplin's concept of "slow" was relative to the destructively fast tempo at which a whole school of "speed" players were playing and ruining the rags; the Maple Leaf rag being the primary victim.
Works by Scott Joplin
See List of compositions by Scott Joplin.
Media
Further reading
- Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (ISBN 0-19-510108-1) — the most authoritative book on Joplin's life.
External links
- , with anecdotes and research.
- A site dedicated to 100 years of the Maple Leaf Rag.
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Recordings and sheet music
- - Free Scores by Joplin
- has freely downloadable piano scores of several of Joplin's works
- (includes cover art, comprehensive sheet music selection, and biography)*
- Kunst der Fuge: (live and piano-rolls recordings)
- - German site with free sheet music and MIDI files
- has excellent MIDI performances of ragtime music by Joplin and others
- Scott Joplin, Complete Piano Rags, David A Jasen, 1988, ISBN 0-486-25807-6
- . This is a recording of the Connorized piano roll made by Joplin in April 1916, and thought lost until mid-2006.
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