Rag-Time Dance, A Stop-Time Two-Step (1899)

World Premiere: November 24, 1899

Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work.

Instrumentation: flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, drum set, piano, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 4'

The Entertainer (1902)

World Premiere: Unknown - Copyrighted December 29, 1902

Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work.

Instrumentation: flute doubling on piccolo, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, drum set, piano, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 5'

Scott Joplin, the son of an ex-slave, was born in Texarkana, Texas on November 24, 1868. He early showed musical talent, and after his mother died, when he was fourteen, he traveled for three years through the Mississippi Valley playing piano mostly in honky-tonks. Joplin settled in St. Louis for eight years before moving for a short time to Chicago, where he formed a band to play in the saloons and bawdy houses, and began noting down some compositions in the day’s most popular styles. He returned to St. Louis sometime around 1894, then worked as a pianist in Sedalia, Missouri at the Maple Leaf Club, whose members were Afro-American but whose clientele was integrated, before settling in East St. Louis, where he quickly garnered a reputation as one of the town’s finest players of ragtime music. He issued his first piano rags in 1899; among them was one named for the club where he worked — the Maple Leaf Rag — which he predicted “will make me the king of ragtime composers.” He was right. He struck a lucrative deal with the local publisher John Stark, and it is estimated that within a decade Stark’s sheet music edition of the Maple Leaf Rag sold nearly a million copies. The success of the piece encouraged Joplin to get married (a disastrous experience that ended quickly in divorce), write more rags, and expand his artistic horizons to include ballet and opera. After several years of wandering in the Midwest (and perhaps as far away as Europe), he moved to New York in 1907, was married again (happily), and spent enormous effort in composing and trying (in vain) to find a publisher for his opera, Treemonisha. Finally, in 1911, he issued the opera himself in a piano reduction, and four years later financed a private performance of the work at a Harlem rehearsal hall. There was no orchestra or staging; Joplin accompanied the singers on a piano. The mostly black audience responded only with boredom, and Joplin’s spirit was crushed. The following year he was admitted to a mental institution in New York, and died there on April 1, 1917 from the complications of syphilis.

Around 1905, John Stark issued a collection of Joplin’s most popular works in instrumental versions for dance band, theater orchestra or park concert ensemble as Fifteen Standard High Class Rags. Joplin himself is thought to have made some of the arrangements, while Stark, D.S. DeLisle and others probably contributed the rest. The anthology was an enormous hit with musicians, who quickly dubbed it The Red Back Book after the color of its binding. In 1972, the American composer, conductor and educator Gunther Schuller made a modern edition of The Red Back Book, and performed it with a twelve-member ensemble at the New England Conservatory, the Smithsonian Institution, Lincoln Center and elsewhere. The success of those concerts (and the subsequent recording made under Schuller’s direction) was one of the most vital elements in sparking the Joplin revival of the 1970s. Today, so wide-spread and persistent is the popularity of Scott Joplin’s incomparable rags that they have come to represent an entire era in American musical and social history.

In the wake of the success of Maple Leaf Rag in 1899, Joplin expanded his artistic vision to include the theatrical genres, first ballet and later, with Treemonisha in 1911, opera. The ballet, titled The Ragtime Dance, was a six-minute affair for dancers and a singer/narrator meant to demonstrate the various dance styles associated with the rags at the African-American balls in Sedalia. (When the score was published in 1902, it included a notice that a separate publication was available with “complete directions for all the steps of The Ragtime Dance.”) The piece was introduced at Wood’s Opera House in Sedalia on November 24, 1899 and included a catchy “Stop-Time” feature, when the music paused and the pianist was instructed to “stamp the heel of one foot heavily upon the floor” in tempo but “not raise the toe of the foot from the floor while stamping.” The score, including the singer’s part with text, was published in 1902 and a shortened version for piano alone issued four years later as Rag-Time Dance, A Stop-Time Two-Step. Marvin Hamlisch included the number in the score for the 1973 film The Sting, for which he won an Oscar.

The Entertainer, published in 1902, may have taken its title from the advertising issued by the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, where Joplin was billed as “The Entertainer.” The Tin Pan Alley composer Monroe H. Rosenfeld wrote in the June 7, 1903 edition of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “It is a jingling work of a very original character, embracing various strains of a retentive nature which set the foot in spontaneous action and leave an indelible imprint on the tympanum.” More than any other of his works, The Entertainer was responsible for the revival of interest in Joplin’s music and in American ragtime in general. The piece reached an enormous audience as the title music for the 1973 Academy Award-winning film The Sting (whose score, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch, received an Oscar and sold over two million copies), and did much to bolster the scholarship and performances then being accorded Joplin by Gunther Schuller, Joshua Rifkin and others. The year after The Sting was released, the first ragtime festival ever held took place in Sedalia, Missouri, the town whose Maple Leaf Club suggested the title of one of Joplin’s best-loved creations. The Entertainer entered the symphonic repertory when Lorin Maazel conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in Schuller’s arrangement of it on January 11, 1976.

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda