Joplin left Chicago leading a male vocal octet the repertoire of which included plantation medleys, popular songs of the day, and his own compositions. In 1893 Joplin played cornet with a band at the World ’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where musicians from throughout the country displayed for one another the regional variations of ragtime and where Joplin was encouraged by pianist Otis Saunders to write down his original compositions. ” The signature fast and frenetic pace of ragtime reflected the jubilant side of the black experience - compared with the melancholy-heavy blues -and the music became, according to Blesh and Janis, America ’s “most original artistic creation. As it grew, it carried its basic principle of displaced accents played against a regular meter to a very high degree of elaboration. settled in Sedalia, MO, where he helped pioneer ragtime movement played comet at World ’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893 published “Maple Leaf Rag, ” 1899 later composed longer pieces, including the 1911 opera Treemonisha.Īwards: Posthumous Pulitzer Prize, 1976 commemorative postage stamp, 1983. Itinerant pianist, touring throughout U.S. In explaining the black roots of the musical form, Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis wrote in They All Played Ragtime, “Piano ragtime was developed by the Negro from folk melodies and from the For the Record …īorn November 24, 1868, in Texarkana, AR died April 1, 1917, in New York City son of Giles (a railroad laborer) and Florence (a laundress maiden name, Givens) Joplin married twice, to Belle Hayden and Lottie Stokes. Although some revisionist historians have placed the birth of ragtime at the feet of white composers, such as Irving Berlin, who published “Alexander ’s Ragtime Band ” in 1911, the true origin of the music was to be found in these lowrent music halls. In a move not uncommon for young blacks at the time, Joplin left home in his early teens, working as an itinerant pianist at the honky-tonks and salons of the Midwest, South, and Southwest. A local German musician, similarly entranced with Scott Joplin ’s gift, gave the boy free lessons, teaching the works of European composers, as well as the nuts and bolts of musical theory and harmony. At first, Giles Joplin was concerned that music would sidetrack his son from a solid, wage-earning trade, but he saw the clear inventive genius in Scott, who, by the time he was 11, was playing and improvising with unbelievable smoothness. Scott, whose first foray into the world of scales and half notes came on the guitar, discovered a richer lyrical agent in his neighbor ’s piano. Like many in the black community, the Joplins saw in music a rewarding tool of expression, and the talented family was sought out to perform at weddings, funerals, and parties. Florence Givens Joplin was a freeborn black woman who worked as a laundress when not taking care of her children. Joplin ’s father, Giles, was a railroad laborer who was born into slavery and obtained his freedom five years before his son ’s birth. He was born November 24, 1868, in Texarkana, a small city straddling the border of Texas and Arkansas. Many of the details of Joplin ’s life, like much of his music, have been lost to history. Sadly, for all his accomplishments in putting a new musical form on the map, Joplin spent his final years madly obsessed with a fruitless crusade to enter, if not conquer, another arena: opera, the staid, classical venue accepted by a white community that had for so long ridiculed ragtime as cheap, vulgar, and facile black music. It was Joplin ’s short, hard-driving melodies -and the syncopated backbone he furnished them - that helped define the musical parameters of ragtime, a style that gave voice to the African-American experience during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Johann Strauss is to the waltz and John Philip Sousa is to the march, so is Scott Joplin to ragtime: its guru, chief champion, the figure most closely associated with its composition.
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