HUM 223 -- Scott Joplin, ragtime and an American tragedy

One of the great stories of American music, although it has elements of tragedy, is that of ragtime piano composer Scott Joplin, who wrote the nation's first million-selling "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 but spent much of his career unsuccessfully trying to get publishers interested in an opera that wasn't performed until 1972.

"When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to recognize me,"he told a friend (as quoted in his biographical sketch in Wikipedia). It took a little longer than that. But in 1976 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, an honor that is not usuallly given posthumuously.

By all accounts, Joplin was gifted musically. The best account on the Internet, in my opinion, is Wikipedia's, which notes:

He was "blessed with an amazing ability to improvise at the piano," writes opera historian Elise Kirk, and was able to enlarge his talents "with the music he heard around him," which was rich with the sounds of gospel hymns and spirituals, dance music, plantation songs, syncopated rhythms, blues, and choruses.

And this:

Although he was penniless and disappointed at the end of his life, Joplin set the standard for ragtime compositions and played a key role in the development of ragtime music. And as a pioneer composer and performer, he helped pave the way for young black artists to reach American audiences of both races. And when he died, notes jazz historian Floyd Levin, "those few who realized his greatness bowed their heads in sorrow. This was the passing of the king of all ragtime writers, the man who gave America a genuine native music."

We'll listen to some of Joplin's work. But tirst, some background ...

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, white audiences were not ready to reward serious music from black artists. Typical was a dance called the Cakewalk ... which was performed to music that sounds like Joplin's. The dance got to be a fad in the early 1900s ... we'll watch some ... the first two clips, full movies shot in 1903, show professional dancers on stage, doing a very stereotyped version of the cakewalk, and the later clip shows people doing a simplified, popularized version of the dance on a beach. Notice the bathing suits! But notice also - this isn't about music or dance.



More typical of the music of the period, perhaps, is this clip of a recent cakewalk contest at the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Mo. It reminds me of older couples I've seen doing the polka at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, and it makes me think these African American-inspired dance steps in turn influenced the polka. The music, by the way, is "At a Georgia Camp Meeting" by Kerry Mills, a favorite marching band and ragtime tune. Ragtime, polka and brass band music were all popular a hundred years ago, and they all influenced each other.



Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) was the first instrumental to sell a million copies, but mostly he eked out a living playing in cafes, restaurants and whorehouses. Opera historian Elise Kirk says he wanted his rags to be like classical msuc. "And he succeeded," she said. "Joplin's piano rags are more tuneful, contrapuntal, infectious, and harmonically colorful than any others of his era." But they weren't as commercially successful as his first one.

We'll listen to Joplin playing "The Entertainer" on a piano roll. That's right. Piano rolls were created by a machine that recorded a musician's playing on perforated rolls of tape, which were then played back. Even reproduced on this mechanical process, listen for how intricate and delicate the piano playing is.



Joplin turned from pop to classical music. Around 1907 he wrote an opera called "Treemonisha." It was like nothing that had been heard before.

In 1911, unable to find a publisher, he undertook the financial burden of publishing "Treemonisha" himself in piano-vocal format and as a last resort to see it staged invited a small audience to hear it at a rehearsal hall in Harlem, in 1915. Poorly staged and with only himself on piano accompaniment, it was "a miserable failure," notes Kirk. The audience, including potential backers, was indifferent and walked out. Scott writes that "after a disastrous single performance ... Joplin suffered a breakdown. He was bankrupt, discouraged, and worn out." He concludes that few American artists of his generation faced such obstacles: "Treemonisha went unnoticed and unreviewed, largely because Joplin had abandoned commercial music in favor of art music, a field closed to African Americans." In fact, it was not until the 1970s that the opera received a full theatrical staging.

But Wikipedia continues:

Ragtime historian Terry Waldo notes that the opera was ahead of its time: "like ragtime music itself, "Treemonisha" was an entirely new art form that was probably only approached in style in the 1920s..." He notes that the opera is a combination of folk music in the framework of a European opera, but is also Joplin's re-creation of his own experiences as an African American man using an opera as a means of expression. But Waldo adds, "such an undertaking was doomed to failure - but failure on such a grand scale that it cannot be dismissed lightly. It is a magnificent attempt, and parts of it approach greatness."

We'll watch some selections from "Treemonisha" - as played at Sedelia's Scott Joplin Festival in 2008. Listen for the interplay between piano and violin, call and response on "Very Fine Day" vocal. Using the definitions we learned at the beginning of the semester, does it strike you as folk, popular or art (classical) ... or elements of all three?