Scott joplin compositions full#
Is this a corrective - a way to to give Joplin something that he couldn’t have received in his time? Specifically, a recital concert from a classical pianist, full stop. We were texting about something else, and I said, “I’m going into the studio to record some Joplin.” He said, “Man, I love Joplin.” By hook and crook we found a date.Īcross the new album, you let melodies breathe in a way we don’t hear in more mechanically syncopated Joplin performances. I think this was when he was still in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Met, last fall. Encores!: The New York City Center’s series, which specializes in brief revivals of Broadway rarities, will see its new music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, lead a restored performance of “Dear World.”.In an eight-decade career, it’s a crowning moment - and just another gig. The Unsinkable Marilyn Maye: The inimitable singer is about to make her Carnegie Hall solo debut.Puppetry of Pi: Members of the puppetry team for the stage adaptation of “Life of Pi,” now in previews on Broadway, discuss making the show’s animals seem real on a very crowded lifeboat.Doubling Down on Corn: For their Broadway musical, “Shucked,” the country-music songwriting team Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark embraced heartfelt songs and campy performances.But once you have that music in your ear, you cannot listen to the rest without knowing it. I’ve never been able to hear the rags without that musical seed in them. Just occasionally there are hints that anything else is going on. The way it sits on the piano - it’s thoroughly 19th century. But it’s also a throughline to the beginning of his life, because that’s where the seed gets planted.Įspecially that little prelude snippet. It was a sad end to this incredible arc of vision and ambition. “Treemonisha” is full of so many things! It’s the end of his life, essentially, after it was done. Your album opens with your own arrangement of the prelude to Act III, and ends with a glimpse of the final number, “A Real Slow Drag.” Why frame the album this way? Joplin is reputed to have played piano for a run-through, with singers, of “Treemonisha” at Harlem’s Lincoln Theater - the present-day site of the Metropolitan A.M.E. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. While “Treemonisha” has been recorded multiple times, in orchestrations that can accommodate a grand opera house or an intimate theater, it is far from a staple of the repertoire. By contrast, when contemporary composer-performers like Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton interpret Joplin, their liberty-taking renditions are intended to place him in dialogue with subsequent waves of avant-garde experimentation. The soundtrack for “The Sting,” the 1973 film featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, uses Joplin tunes for their evocation of easygoing yet audacious Americana.
The reputation he did live to experience, as the so-called king of ragtime, was rooted in his earlier piano works written in Missouri, like “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer.”Įven now, there are many different Joplins. A colleague later recalled him saying, “When I’m dead 25 years, people are going to begin to recognize me.”Ī full production of his “Treemonisha” - one of the first operas by a Black American composer - had proved elusive during his final decade, when he lived in New York. Not long before his death in 1917, Scott Joplin predicted that he would become a fixture of the American musical canon.
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