The Rag Man: Revisiting America’s Master Musical Miniaturist, Scott Joplin | Hacker News Reader

The Rag Man: Revisiting America’s Master Musical Miniaturist, Scott Joplin

the-american-interest.com

34 pointstintinnabula7 comments

Very happy to see a Scott Joplin article posted here. Joplin aspired to be taken seriously as a classical composer. Although some of his rags were popular when they were published, recognition as a serious composer never came during his lifetime.

His piano pieces are lively and melodious, but also sometimes melancholic (like Solace and Bethena Waltz) perhaps reflecting the troubled life he led. As the article states, Joplin did not want his rags to be played at fast speeds. This is often the case in many recordings (including, in my opinion, with Joshua Rifkin). My favourite performer of Joplin's music is the late Canadian musician John Arpin.

I listen mostly to classical music and love Joplin's piano music, but even today, there's still some snobbishness about Joplin's music from some quarters in the classical field. There's a little bit of it here in this discussion of Joplin from BBC Radio 3:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01w64mq

But wherever you start with Joplin's music, the sound of a rag is irresistible.

Magnetic Rag, his last piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweSQtoc8D0

Thanks for that! Beautiful piece. Haunting in places.

I have played a bunch of Scott Joplins pieces. Ragtime is a very structured sound but it also had syncopation and the general sound of a Ragtime song. The only real ragtime composer I have ever heard of is Scott Joplin.

Joplin is the only one you have heard of because he was just about the only one with a publisher. The rest simply improvised. Many could not read music. Joplin had some classical training, although he quit it young. His use of syncopation is much more restrained that many other ragtime musicians, and that is what makes it lastingly interesting. It is the lack of syncopation where you expect it that keeps the brain in a state of pleasant surprise.

It's somewhat odd to see the author gloss over the fact that ragtime began as a guitar style...

Citation needed? I don't recall ever hearing that before, and the wikipedia entry for ragtime doesn't mention guitar in the context of the history of the genre at all. It does talk about Ben Harney [1], who allegedly invented the term and was a piano player, and brings up the obvious connections of the form (at least as Joplin wrote it) to marches in the Sousa style.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Harney

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