maple leaf rag analysis

Surprisingly, after the productive year of 1909, 1910 saw only one rag issued. This quintessential rag brings together many aspects of a rag into one neatly packed piano work.Â, The quick tempo and huge leaps for both hands makes this a difficult rag for any pianist. Performing Arts Reading Room, Library of Congress. I played my, Joplin offered to present the “Sensation” manuscript to Stark personally and suggested his name be put on after that of Lamb: “Arranged by Scott Joplin.” It might help to sell his first rag, Joplin thought. Despite—or perhaps because of—his deeply amorous nature marriage had been an especially serious step for Joplin, who was thirtytwo years old when he wed. One says “amorous nature” and adds “perhaps fated” because it is all, in essence, to be found in his only diary, his music. It first was published as sheet music in 1899, initially selling very slowly because classic ragtime is challenging to play. Under the title is the caption “Picked by Scott Joplin.”, A misunderstanding about that caption arose in the early ragtime-revival circles of the ig4o’s. The Joplin rags from 1908 on suggest that Lottie Stokes, at last, brought him peaceful love. That all publications masquerading under the name ot ragtime are not the genuine article will be better known when these exercises are studied. So, with all the others, Scott Joplin floated back and forth through Missouri, on down into the Ozark towns, and into the newly opened Oklahoma and Indian territories, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. cott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” was published in 1899 and became immensely popular. From at least as early as 1909 he had been laboring on a major conception, the Afro-American opera Treemonisha . Along with the music is a printed between-the-staves commentary: “The noise of the trains while running at the rate of sixty miles per hour,” “Whistling for the crossing,” and finally “The collision,” described by four short, frantic high discords, followed by a heavy, low chord. Maple Leaf Rag" Harmonic Rhythm in Verse Form 'l * * This diminished 7th chord, constructed on the #4 scale degree to function as a leading tone modifier of the V chord, is spelled with Bk rather than Cb since it is progressing up to the C of the 1 6/4 (a V preparation chord) BEFORE it finally Scott Joplin was born, both he and his death certificate said, in Texarkana. Those years should by no means be deprecated. Then at last he brought his loneliness to an end when he met Lottie Stokes and married her, meanwhile writing his first and only published tango. By 1908 Joplin can definitely be located in New York, and two rags of that year, “Sugar Cane” and “Pineapple,” bear the Manhattan imprint of the Seminary Music Company. Compare and contrast these two pieces of music: Beethoven’s Violin Romance No. Mrs. Seeker notes that the spectators did not escape unscathed: The boilers burst, showering the crowd with chunks of red-hot, razor-sharp metal. It is not surprising, in retrospect. Though most, like Edward MacDowell, were outspokenly hostile to the “nigger whorehouse music,” the real genius among them, Charles Ives, loved this “street” music and quoted from it in his works. Already a hit, ragtime became a national rage and then, immediately, an international one. The melody of the piece is in a major tonality and is, for the most part, disjunct; the melody jumps around in leaps. Turpin—owner, bartender, and ragtime pianistcomposer of the Rosebud Café—was Scott Joplin’s staunch friend. Fate gave him only forty-eight years to pursue that dream. He found a card, dated February 18, 1903, bearing the title A GUEST OF HONOR A Ragtime Opera by SCOTT JOPLIN, In addition it stated “Published by John Stark & Son, copyright 1903 by Scott Joplin.” Here was an unheard-of Joplin item and one, despite the card, apparently never published. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians. Two waltzes came out in 1895, with the imprint of two different Syracuse publishers: “A Picture of Her Face” and “Please Say You Will”—“As Featured By the Texas Medley Quartette.” Rushed off the presses, the sheet music was then carried by the Quartette and hawked at their concerts. Rags; For piano; Scores featuring the piano; [ 30 more...] For 1 player; For guitar, violin (arr); For 2 players (arr); Scores featuring the guitar (arr); Scores featuring the violin (arr); For flute, guitar (arr); Scores featuring the … Size 10.0 Source 78 User_cleaned Bai Konte User_metadataentered Princeton01 User_transferred Sean Gaston Joplin exemplified the Horatio Alger legend of early success, although he reached beyond the financial rewards that mark the boundaries of Alger’s concept. He classicized two popular American dance forms, the cakewalk and the two-step, very much as European composers had done with the popular dance forms around them. But it is nonetheless essentially a rag; playing it even in simple syncopation establishes this beyond a doubt. With her came stability and a haven in which to teach and compose. Even such a paragon of respectability as Charles Wakefield Cadman, the composer of. There are a full twenty from his own hand, from “Peacherine” and “The Easy Winners” in 1901 on to “Searchlight” in 1907. Equally important, he was deeply imbued with respect for the masters and their music. He quickly took root in the Pettis county seat, where he was to publish his first two real rags and to sponsor two gifted fifteen-year-old black Sedalia youths, Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden, as ragtime composers. It was evident to many when this rag was first published that it was based on the format of Joplin's first big hit, Maple Leaf Rag. Two of these, issued by Robert Smith, are “Combination March” and “Harmony Club Waltz.”. It hardly matters what youthful lapses in midwestern red-light districts brought him thus ignobly to this end. Officially the great American composer died of the terrifying finale of syphilis, dementia paralytica. It seems possible, even likely, thatjoplin mayhave witnessed the event. Many a fine tune was sold outright, without royalties, for a twenty-dollar bill. Although New York was now his base, Joplin remained restless or, at least, peripatetic, touring on the Percy G. Williams vaudeville circuit, billed as “King of Ragtime Composers—Author of Maple Leaf Rag.” He appeared as a single, and his playing was excellent though not flashy. Its modest three pages of piano score, It was not so abroad. When his teacher played Bach or Beethoven for him, Scott felt that he was part of it all. … Joplin liked Sensation best of my first three rags. This is “Stoptime,” a reversion to the composer’s earlier, more extroverted work, with instructions for the pianist to stamp one foot at indicated places while his two hands are amply occupied with the score. Ragtime music adapted to the unique style and invention of each composer and musician. It is often known as the most famous ragtime piece that has gone on to inspire a number of composers. The full score in vocal-piano form, running to two hundred and seventy pages, was published by the composer at his own expense in 1911. … Nor can there be any doubt about its vigour, brimming over with life. Scott Joplin is regarded by most as the "King" of Ragtime Writers, in part due to his early success with the best-selling Maple Leaf Rag but more importantly due to the enduring nature and quality of his ragtime compositions.This page sets out information on Scott Joplin in the following topics: Mr. Joplin asked if my rags were really good. Until very recently it has been assumed that “Crush Collision” dealt with an actual accident that had occurred on the “Katy Line” (, The newspaper and magazine coverage was extensive, and the local public talked about little else for months thereafter. This dearth of rags can be traced to Joplin’s continued and now obsessive preoccupation with grand opera. All through this period the successive rags develop into individual statements, expressed through Joplin’s outstanding ability to create highly personal and ever-new melodies set forth in constantly surprising new rhythmic patterns. One of those was his now-estranged publisher John Stark who derided Joplin's efforts of the time in personal notes. However, at the time of his death, Joplin’s ragtime genre was quickly replaced by the rise of jazz and other forms of music. Joplinâs music went out of fashion, with only a small number of ragtime aficionados keeping his music alive. This is “Stoptime,” a reversion to the composer’s earlier, more extroverted work, with instructions for the pianist to stamp one foot at indicated places while his two hands are amply occupied with the score. Joseph Francis Lamb was just twenty-one and Joplin forty years old at the time, and their meeting took place when young Lamb dropped into Stark’s New York store, near the Flatiron Building on East Twenty-third Street. In 1911 the mass audience, already tiring of piano ragtime, was very much in the novelty “coon-song” groove of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Nearly two decades later the scene would at last be ready for a “black” opera, and George Gershwin would score with Porgy and Bess . His fairness was amply repaid. Scott Joplin, the composer, spent only a few years of his life in Sedalia before he moved on to St. Louis and New York. But even an expensive full-length audition performance conducted by the composer in 1915, with an invited audience, failed to attract an angel. I had met Scott Joplin and was going home to tell the folks. Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin (John Stark & Son, c1899). Range - The piano in … Even when separation loomed as inevitable, he asked for help from his young protégés: “As my brother, Lee Marshall, Hayden and I were like his brothers, Joplin often asked us to console Mrs. Joplin—perhaps she would reconsider … but a separation finally resulted.”. Joplin roamed about the country. The colored fellow spoke up and asked whether I had certain pieces which he named. Halfway through that year an American newspaper headline declared “Paris Has Gone Rag Time Wild,” with reports of the French cakewalking in the streets to, Ragtime surmounted racism. Joplin's most famous composition, "Maple Leaf Rag," was published while he was living in Sedalia, Missouri. Composition Year. The great comedian Bert Williams, for example, recalled: “[My partner] and I would never have got onstage so beautifully dressed if we didn’t throw it away for a laugh. He was fifty years ahead of his time. In any case he gave the premiere performance of The Great Crush Collision March in Temple in mid-November, 1896. But it still rings with originality in spite of the detractors. It was the right time and the right place, and something extraordinary happened. The march-like style paired with the cakewalk-inspired melody creates the archetypal ragtime composition. But this visit developed into something more momentous. When I finished, Joplin said, “That’s a good rag—a regular Negro rag.” That’s what I wanted to hear. JoaquÃn Rodrigo ‘FantasÃa para un gentilhombre’: For the Gentleman, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ‘Serenade for Strings’: Return of the Strings, Francis Poulenc ‘Sextet for Wind Quintet & Piano’: Les Six Sextet, Ludovico Einaudi ‘Nuvole Binache’: Soft Clouds. When “The Entertainer” came around again, more than seventy years after its first success, its music was as fresh and timely as if just composed. They are notable, also, for being prefaced by his only surviving comment on ragtime: What is scurrilously tailed nuftime is an invention that is hero to stay. But Joplin, who foresaw it all, was long dead. It was his childhood and youth, distilled into a vision of the future of a race and a country. Their first house was in midtown, on West Fortyseventh Street in the area then known as San Juan Hill because the black population had migrated there from downtown about the time of the Spanish-American War. Ferdinand HÃ©rold ‘Zampa Overture’: Celebration. Joplin’s musical description of this apocalyptic event is a milestone in his development into a ragtime composer, for it is actually a rag without indications for syncopation. "Maple Leaf Rag" is a multi-strain ragtime march with athletic bass lines and upbeat melodies. It is all one, anyway. Though most, like Edward MacDowell, were outspokenly hostile to the “nigger whorehouse music,” the real genius among them, Charles Ives, loved this “street” music and quoted from it in his works. It was named after the Maple Leaf Club; the date the club was founded is uncertain, but it was no later than November 24, 1898, when the first Maple Leaf ball was held. ). The Maple Leaf Rag, Elite Syncopations as well as The Entertainer. He played cornet with the Queen City Concert Band and started to commit his musical ideas to paper. Of them all Scott proved to be the most musical and the most ambitious. In any event, his next contact and publications were to be models of unprejudiced fairness. This certainly does not accord with the proud (though gentle) nature described by all who knew him. The Stark descendants have recalled that Guest of Honor was a family topic for years, a project planned, postponed, and planned again but never accomplished. What most likely is involved is the crude racist humor of the period, a labored vaudevillesque pun comparing a ragtime tunesmith to a ragpicker. It was one of Joplin's early works, and became the model for ragtime compositions by subsequent composers. Then he swung down to Texarkana. The cover shows an old, tattered Negro picking up rags in front of a dilapidated cabin. It is typical of much ragtime music written around the turn of the century. I played my Sensation first and they began to crowd around and watch me. The long neglect of the unmarked grave in St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens was remedied, fittingly, by a society to which Joplin did not belong but of which he should have been a charter member. The way that Maple Leaf Rag specifically achieves its purpose of entertaining people, is that because of the accenting of the bass notes on beats 2 and 4, and because of the way the melody works in ragtime, it results in the awesome foot tapping joy that know and have come to love over the many. In 1916, gravely deteriorated, he was committed by Lottie. Searched for since 1949 almost as assiduously as The Guest of Honor , the undiscovered trunk is another of ragtime’s mysteries. Ragtime was a resounding declaration of independence: the revolutionary idea of a music both classical and popular—classical in its formal complexity yet popular in its irresistible rhythm and melody—a classicism of, by, and for the people, black and white. There the house of Carl Huffman bought “Original Rags” but foolishly passed up the more brilliant “Maple Leaf Rag.” “Original Rags” came out in late March, 1899. Texture Maple Leaf Rag Rhythm Tone Colour The texture of this piece is homophonic, the right hand has the melody, while the left hand (bass) simply provides accompaniment. Thus early he became for a time “a homeless itinerant,” as his future publisher and friend, John Stark, was to characterize him after his death, adding the terse, true commentary: “He left his mark on American music.”. The range … The use of the lower notes against the high notes creates a contrast that feels like an adult borrowing childhood for a few moments. Tragedy came with the death of a baby girl who, ill from birth, lived only a few months. Of the half dozen or so other great talents of classic ragtime Scott Joplin personally sponsored and aided no fewer than three: Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden of Missouri and Joseph Lamb of New York. The publication date was around mid-September, 1899. Before the year 1896 was out, Scott Joplin returned to Sedalia, this time to settle there and to enroll at the George R. Smith College for Negroes to advance his musical education. Today each of the twin cities that face and merge across the Arkansas-Texas state line claim him as a native son. It is understandable that a craftsman like Joplin would refer to the name as “scurrilous.” And yet this term, deprecatory as was “jazz,” served less to belittle the music than to lend it a titillating sort of mystery. Bennett, however, had scant faith that our ears would hear: The American dilettanti never did and never will look in the right quarters for vital art. Many a fine composition was discarded in its original form for a simpler, more salable version. Scott had an older brother, Monroe, and two younger ones: Will, who sang and strummed guitar, and Robert, who sang and did a little songwriting. Its subject was Joplin’s race and its quest for equality. His mother, Florence Givens Joplin, was born free in Kentucky. The sudden explosion of this one Joplin number sparked a public rage for ragtime. -Leola: This “fancy Maple Leaf” uses the same basic harmonic and thematic layout as that famous rag as well the same keys/key relationship (A flat/A Flat/D Flat/return to A Flat), though in a more graceful, lyrical style, so might be a good stepping stone toward Maple Leaf or perhaps just after learning Maple Leaf. It would not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of railwaystations and the draughtsmanship and sketch-writing of newspapers, because they have not the wit to learn that genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine public demand. He was only fourteen when he left home, driven out mainly by his father’s growing objections to the hours he devoted to music when he should have been learning a trade. Nor does this list complete that fruitful period; add several more beautiful waltzes, some spirited marches, a long composition, In the 1940’s the ragtime scholar Roy Carew, searching through the musical copyright files in Washington, made an intriguing discovery. In all this confused babble, with all his success, sat Scott Joplin. Scott Joplin is remembered for being one of the most memorable ragtime composers of the turn-of-the-century during his lifetime (1868-1917). © Copyright 1949-2021 American Heritage Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved. “Maple Leaf Rag,” its first-issue cover adorned with cakewalking couples borrowed from a tobacco ad, took off like a rocket; its climbing sales spread out from Sedalia to cover the nation within months. “Really,” said Mrs. Stark. Scott Joplin was famous for his Maple Leaf Rag and others but could write music in other styles. The moot subject that eventually estranged Joplin and Stark was an extended pro and con discussion concerning the publication of another long work, a folk ballet, with solo narrator, called The Ragtime Dance . But it is doubtful that any Scott Joplin rags would have been thought of by movie producers today were it not for the phenomenon of “The Maple Leaf Rag.” The stupendous international hit that it became in 1899–1900 made it the first instrumental, so far as is known, to top the million mark in sales of sheet music. But there were competitions less perilous: one pianist, perhaps white, pitting his “finger-buster” against that of a rival player, perhaps black. Required fields are marked *, JoaquÃn Rodrigo: FantasÃa para un gentilhombre Context Composed in 1954 for guitarist AndrÃ©s Segovia, FantasÃa para un gentilhombre (Fantasia for a Gentleman) was premiered by Segovia and The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Enrique Read more…, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings Context Composed in 1880, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovskyâs popular Serenade for Strings received its premiere at a private event at Moscow Conservatory in December of the same year. That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. The rags comprise four by his own hand, “Fig Leaf,” “Rose Leaf,” “The Nonpareil,” and “Gladiolus,” plus two collaborative rags, “Lily Queen” with Hayden and “Heliotrope Bouquet.” The latter is the most haunting and perhaps the most precious of all his collaborative efforts, for its first two themes rescued from oblivion two melodies by the handsome young wastrel Louis Chauvin just before he died of syphilis at the age of twentyfive. Even among American composers, however, there were significant defections. Still he kept moving on. Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and all the other virtuosos knew “Euphonic Sounds.” In 1949, long after Joplin’s death, the superb technician and gifted composer James P. Johnson was moved to say: “Scott Joplin was a great forerunner. And still in the fruitful year of 1909 there is the tango, “Solace,” and “Euphonic Sounds,” which is pronouncedly classic in outlook and so difficult to play that it became a technical test piece for the just-emerging Harlem, or Eastern, style of ragtime. Click on the linked cheat sheets for popular chords, chord progressions, downloadable midi files and more! In it reality and unreality met, day and night merged, and differences of skin pigmentation ceased to matter greatly. But Freeman, the pupil of Dvorak, enjoyed Establishment support; Joplin, self-taught, did not; and he was twenty years too early for popular support. The 1908 “Pineapple Rag” is balladic, almost narrative; “Wall Street,” written the next year, is both amatory and aristocratic, with a soft, secretive, cozening trio; “Country Club” is a study in the alternate ideas of dance and song. 2 Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag Explain in classical terms why a modern character is a hero. The fad began in 1897, and by 1900 it was a veritable mania. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com. The thirty-ton engines, one painted red and one green, ran unmanned for two miles and had reached a speed of ninety miles an hour when they smashed nose-to-nose. Some reports of his whereabouts are factual; some are rumors. These melodies and their haunting harmonizations become the pages of the secret diary of an intensely private and searching nature. Publication came in 1902. Before he was fourteen, Joplin was adept at basic keyboard technique and sight-reading and had the foundation necessary to extend and confirm his evident instinct for harmony. After Joplinâs death in 1917, ragtime music came out of the âmainstreamâ line and started to form into the likes of jazz, big band swing and the blues. 1899. In 1972 the opera had a triumphant production in Atlanta, but this distant event offered no solace to Joplin in 1917. Like most music at the time it was published in sheet music form; it became the first instrumental sheet music to sell over a million copies. This jibes, too, with the contemporary habit of calling ragtime pianists ragpickers (the New Orleans ragtime player Tony Jackson wrote a song called “Pick-It Boy”) and echoes the then well-remembered generic source of the early ragtime piano style in the syncopated “jigs” that the early minstrel men picked out on the fivestring banjo. Severe disappointments in his wandering youth combined to bring him down turn of the secret diary of intensely! That make up the street hinged on the card states “ Copies never received. ” as a young boy... They took their manuscripts to white publishers—and there were tensions, of course, and it changed course... Was young elements of the period nature described by all who knew him modern character is revealing... The death of a race and a half published as sheet music in 1899 ``... 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