Scott Joplin

Ragtime was dance music and a sheet-music trade until Joplin insisted it was composition. Born in Texas around 1868 into a musical household near Texarkana, he had early teaching from the German-born Julius Weiss, worked his way through the South and Midwest as a young player, and settled at Sedalia, Missouri, in the 1890s, where he studied at the George R. Smith College. Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, fixed the classic form — contrasting strains, balanced periods, syncopation held over a firm harmonic tread — and went on selling for decades. The Entertainer, Elite Syncopations, Solace and Magnetic Rag show how much variety that frame would take. He printed instructions on his covers that the pieces were never to be played fast, an argument he lost for seventy years and won afterwards. His largest ambition, the opera Treemonisha, went unstaged in any full sense in his lifetime. He died in New York in 1917; the Pulitzer board gave him a special award in 1976, by which time the rags were back on every piano. The catalogue he left runs to forty-four original rags, a ballet and two operas, and the name King of Ragtime followed him. Money trouble persisted after the Maple Leaf Rag years and cost him his first opera, A Guest of Honor, which was lost; he moved to New York in 1907, and the partly staged Treemonisha of 1911 was poorly received. The rags returned in the early 1970s with a million-selling record of them played by Joshua Rifkin.