Weekend, May 28-29, 2022 – WE ALL HUM HIS TUNES AND ENJOY THEM!!

By admin

In observance of Memorial Day, the newly renovated Lighthouse Tower will be illuminated red, white and blue from Saturday May 28th through Monday, May 30th.

(This is an image from a test lighting a few weeks ago.)
Enjoy a happy and safe holiday weekend!

FROM THE ARCHIVES

WEEKEND,  MAY  28-29,  2022



THE  687th   EDITION

SCOTT JOPLIN

AND

NEW YORK

STEPHEN BLANK

Scott Joplin and NYC

Stephen Blank

Scott Joplin? Of course. You remember the music in The Sting. And maybe you’ve heard the Maple Leaf Rag. And ragtime? Ragtime is a form of music that emerged in the African American community, a precursor of jazz, that was very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scott Joplin was at the center, the King of Ragtime. But Scott Joplin and New York City? Well, dance on.

Britannica Image

Many famous musicians lived here. Everyone knows that John Lennon, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington were (or became) New Yorkers. But also, Miles Davis, Richie Havens, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and Woody Guthrie all had apartments in the City. And no shortage of famous classic composers. Not just Lenny Bernstein – Sergei Rachmaninov, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Astor Piazzolla and John Cage all lived and worked here.

Many musical artists stayed in the same hotel – the Hotel Earle (later Washington Square Hotel) on Waverly Place. Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, John and Michelle Phillips, Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, and Dee Dee Ramone all stayed there.

Scott Joplin lived in New York, too, and composed many works here.

But a modest detour, just for a moment, to talk about ragtime. (I rely heavily in the next paragraphs on several Wikipedia articles.)

It’s “rag” time because it of its syncopated or “ragged” rhythm. Historians see several roots. Ragtime originated in African American music “descended from the jigs and march music played by African American bands.” But some see a much wider history: “A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.”

Scott Joplin brought these various streams together and was centrally identified with ragtime during the early 20th century. Indeed, the Joplin’s style of composition is considered “classic rag” to distinguish his works from other “common” rags. The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, more sophisticated than earlier ragtime, was published in 1899, and was widely popular.

Second edition cover of Maple Leaf Rag with Joplin photo Wikipedia

Published is a key word. Ragtime was popular before sound recording was widely available. Like classical music, but unlike jazz, classical ragtime has a written tradition, being distributed in sheet music rather than through recordings or by imitation of live performances.  Joplin was trained in musical notation, and his works were carefully prepared for publication. He was able to copyright his works. This is a clue to helping understand Joplin’s self-image and aspirations.
 
Ragtime quickly established itself as a distinctly American form of popular music. It was the first African American music to have an impact on mainstream popular culture. (Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag was famous enough for the John Wanamaker department store to include it in a 1904 ad for piano rolls in The New York Times.) Piano “professors” such as Jelly Roll Morton played ragtime in the “sporting houses” of New Orleans. Polite society embraced ragtime played by brass bands and society dance bands. The new rhythms of ragtime changed the world of dance bands and led to new dance steps, popularized by the show-dancers Vernon and Irene Castle during the 1910s. The growth of dance orchestras in popular entertainment was an outgrowth of ragtime and continued into the 1920s. Irving Berlin was the most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs, and his Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911) was the single most widely performed and recorded piece of this sort, even though it contains virtually no ragtime syncopation.

http://ragpiano.com/comps/sjoplin.shtml

European classical composers were also influenced by ragtime. The first notable classical composer to take a serious interest in ragtime was Antonín Dvořák. French composer Claude Debussy emulated ragtime in three pieces for piano. Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud never made any secret of their sympathy for ragtime, which is sometimes evident in their works. Igor Stravinsky wrote a solo piano work called Piano-Rag-Music in 1919 and also included a rag in his theater piece L’Histoire du soldat (1918). 
 
Scott Joplin was born around 1867 and lived in Texarkana. The Joplins were a musical family and Scott studied piano with local teachers. Joplin traveled through the Midwest from the mid-1880s, performing at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Settling in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1895, he studied music at the George R. Smith College for Negroes and hoped for a career as a concert pianist and classical composer. He taught and performed in Sedalia and wrote some of his most famous rags there.
 
The Maple Leaf Rag made Joplin framous and he was again on tour, only this time with much more celebrity and revenue. During the succeeding years, Joplin was a prolific composer with rags spilling from his pen with a pace that even astounded his publisher and the various orchestras clamoring for his latest production.  In 1900, Joplin moved to St. Louis.
 
Joplin wanted to extend his ragtime work beyond popular songs, seeking to combine the ragtime syncopation with the structures and forms of art music genres such as ballet and opera. In 1902, he published his first extended work, Rag Time Dance, a ballet suite using ragtime rhythms, with his own chorographical directions. For much of his life, Joplin soughtto synthesize the worlds of ragtime and opera and in 1903 wrote his first opera, A Guest of Honor, which has, alas, been lost.
 
In 1907, he moved to New York City, where he first lived in an old brownstone converted to a rooming house at 128 West 29th Street, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley. He published 25 of his 53 works while here, including three significant rags: “Wall Street,” “Pineapple” and “Magnetic.”

The first edition cover of “Pine Apple Rag”, composed and released by Scott Joplin in 1908. Wikipedia

He also wrote an instruction book, The School of Ragtime, outlining his complex bass patterns, sporadic syncopation, stop-time breaks, and harmonic ideas, which were widely imitated. Written in the style of an art music treatise, The School of Ragtime demonstrates how serious Joplin was about ragtime. He warned that not all syncopated music “that masqueraded under the name of ragtime” was genuine. Only by giving each note its proper value and by “scrupulously observing” the music’s markings could a pianist achieve the correct effect. Above all, he cautioned, “never play ragtime fast at any time.” “Joplin ragtime,” as he termed his style, would be destroyed by careless interpretation.
 
In New York, Joplin spent much of his time looking for funding for another opera he had created, Treemonisha, a multi-genre three-act opera which told the story of a rural African American community near Texarkana. No one was interested – even Irving Berlin, it is said, turned him down. The Opera’s first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the piano, was “disastrous” and was never performed again in Joplin’s lifetime. The score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, and a fully orchestrated and staged performance took place in 1972. 
 
Joplin continued to work on various musical forms and formed his own publishing company with his third wife, Lottie Stokes, in 1913. His final address in New York was in Harlem, at 163 W. 131st St., just west of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (a plaque there says that this was the last residence of the great ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin). He lived there with Lottie when he died on April 1, 1917. By this time, he had already established his place in the pantheon of American music, but he never had enough money and struggled with health and financial issues.

Treemonisha (1911) Wikipedia

By 1916, he had started to succumb to the ravages of syphilis, which he was thought to have contracted years earlier, and was later hospitalized and institutionalized. Joplin died on April 1, 1917. He was buried in an unmarked community grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens. In 1974, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers placed a plaque at the grave site.

Joplin and his fellow ragtime composers rejuvenated American popular music, fostering an appreciation for African American music among European-Americans by creating exhilarating and liberating dance tunes. “Its syncopation and rhythmic drive gave it a vitality and freshness attractive to young urban audiences indifferent to Victorian proprieties…Joplin’s ragtime expressed the intensity and energy of a modern urban America.”
 
Ragtime would enjoy a resurgence during the 1940s, and then in the ’70s became a hugely popular genre that also entered the US consciousness via film—The Entertainer became the theme song for The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Joplin’s Treemonisha was also fully staged in 1975 on Broadway. The following year, Joplin received a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize, honoring the man who shaped a genre that influenced decades of music.
 
Stephen Blank
RIHS
May 24, 2022

WEEKEND PHOTO

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roosevetltislandhistory@gmail.com

FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING ON MADISON SQUARE
ARON EISENPREISS, ANDY SPARBERG, ED LITCHER, LAURA HUSSEY, GLORIA HERMAN
ALL GOT IT RIGHT!

Text by STEPHEN BLANK

Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

SOURCES

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2013/12/05/scott-joplin-wizard-ragtime/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-Joplin
New York Times, Feb. 4, 2007
New York Times, May 5, 2017
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200035815
https://www.biography.com/musician/scott-joplin
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/show/howards-day-off/2018-01-27/classical-music-in-the-usa-4-the-beginnings-of-jazz
https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/king-of-ragtime-scott-joplin-lived-in-harlem-2

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