
The Rag Man: Revisiting America’s Master Musical Miniaturist, Scott Joplin - tintinnabula
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/08/05/the-rag-man/
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vanilla-almond
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](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01w64mq)

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

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david-given
Magnetic Rag, his last piece:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweSQtoc8D0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweSQtoc8D0)

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PeterWhittaker
Thanks for that! Beautiful piece. Haunting in places.

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zitterbewegung
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.

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dbcurtis
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.

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1propionyl
It's somewhat odd to see the author gloss over the fact that ragtime began as
a guitar style...

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colomon
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Harney)

