![]() ![]() In a sense, however, the volume of new information only highlights Joplin’s fundamental inaccessibility. However, the internet has made it so much easier to comb ancient newspapers for data on the movements and activities of performers that Berlin has now been able to expand his chronicle of Joplin by a third. The volume is a second edition of a work first published in 1994, which itself instantly rendered all previous biographical treatments of Joplin obsolete. This makes Berlin’s achievement all the more astonishing. He “liked a little beer,” a friend recalled, but there is no indication that he was one to exactly fill a room. Larger personalities can break through to us from such a chronological distance through colorful anecdotes, but Joplin was a reserved fellow who inspired no such stories. ![]() In the vocal quartet he led well into adulthood, we know that he sang second tenor, the part that usually carries the melody, and this report on his singing voice is by default the most immediate indication extant of what the man was actually like in a human sense. ![]() He was only photographed a few times, grainily. He made no recordings other than a few piano rolls. His only child died in infancy, and thus no direct descendants have been available to provide reminiscences. The modestly successful black musician born just after the Civil War and dying in 1917 could leave behind only flickers of a historical record. First, high art is always a limited taste second, even at its finest ragtime is an art of limited parameters, the musical equivalent of the miniature and the madeleine, incompatible with larger scale.Īs such, Joplin’s life story is a poignantly gloomy one, starting with a humble beginning and wandering gradually into a tragic ending, and seeming even sadder in the dimness of the picture available to us. Almost obsessed with fashioning ragtime as high art, Joplin was bested by two obstacles. Yet a white Scott Joplin would have had little more success. Certainly, his being black in an America most of whose citizens saw black people as barely human didn’t help. In the end, the reason Joplin’s music burned brightly only for a spell forty years ago is the same reason Joplin never found true success in his lifetime. I highly suspect that if used on the soundtrack of a hit movie today, Joplin’s music, even though largely unheard today, would barely occasion notice beyond a few musicians and musicologists. The ’70s were the tail end of the time when pop music was often couched in melody and harmony elaborate enough that, for example, one could render it on a piano (Chicago Earth, Wind & Fire Billy Joel). ![]() Ragtime’s descendant, jazz, differs from it partly in having exactly that “jamming” essence and thus reaches the modern ear more easily ragtime sounds like juice and cookies in contrast. Moreover, Joplin’s rags are gorgeous but not “hot,” and the rock sensibility dominant since the 1970s makes it hard for most to connect with music that has so little “swagger” as some might put it these days. For the amateur instrumentalist, the 20 th century became the age of the guitar, and in a music history class of 23 I recently taught, not a single one of the students had ever played the piano. This had kept them a minority taste among pianists even in their prime, and today they are even less accessible given that ever fewer people play the piano. The elegant ragtime pieces Joplin wrote better than anyone else are as difficult to play as they are lovely to hear. Before long, ragtime had gone back to what it had been since the 1940s and what it remains today: a hobby lovingly cultivated by a small, expert fan base. Gone are the days when LPs of ragtime in endless permutations were legion in record stores, when the music pattern on the wrapping paper of a gift I was given was not Mozart or Beethoven but, in fact, staves from one of Joplin’s lesser-known rags, when anyone who went near a piano would at least attempt the first page of “The Entertainer.” Classical pianist Joshua Rifkin’s recordings in the early ’70s of Joplin’s rags, played accurately and majestically in a concert hall, helped establish Joplin as a composer to take seriously-but only one of those LPs was even transferred to CD.Įven by the early ’80s when I discovered ragtime through the abovementioned kinds of experiences, those LPs in the record bins were dusty and priced low. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (2 nd edition) ![]()
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