8/26/2023 0 Comments Ragtime movie mother and father![]() It’s possible a white person in that household offered him some musical education in exchange for his mother’s work, but no one has been able to confirm that. The first biography of Joplin, They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, suggests that a seven-year-old Joplin practiced piano in a white household in Texarkana, where his mother cleaned. We know, however, that his mother was freeborn in Kentucky, and his father was born into slavery in North Carolina. Biographers have been unable to authenticate most of the facts of Joplin’s early life. Joplin was born around 1868, possibly in the vicinity of Texarkana, Texas (a town that wasn’t actually founded until 1873). ![]() Did they think that I didn’t care? Or had they found that students fared better focusing solely on the music as written and their technique in playing it? I know for certain that my teachers had rigorously studied classical music history. It’s curious to me now that we didn’t talk about historical backdrops and personal tragedies. Although I was expected to know the dates and features of different musical styles, my teachers rarely if ever contextualized the music they asked me to play. At weekly lessons, I learned theory, practiced sight-reading, and played pieces from every musical period. It is, after all, a vivacious, happy piece that looks harder to play than it actually is.Ĭan you play a piece of music well without knowing its background? Is everything you need to know really on the page?ĭuring the years I studied piano, we presumed yes. Joplin’s rag was more delightful and impressive. When guests came to my mother’s house, my stepfather urged me to play it. ![]() That is, until something unexpected happened: I began playing it reasonably well and people loved it. I felt bad about being asked to devote my time to a piece that’s often programmed into player pianos. When my teacher, who was a professor of music at the university, handed me the “Maple Leaf,” I presumed it was because he’d disqualified me from playing other, “more serious” pieces. His race didn’t register with me as particularly important, but on the other hand, from somewhere I’d absorbed the idea that ragtime music was simpler and less important than the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. I’d at least learned that Joplin was Black because his photo appeared on my spiral-bound volume of his music. I still knew nothing about Joplin, the man, when I was 14 and my piano teacher asked me to learn “Maple Leaf Rag.” Or I knew almost nothing. I’m not ashamed of this, but it’s baffling to think that in the 1990s I lived in a place where I was able to spend a year playing “The Entertainer” and learn absolutely nothing about the history of African American music, specifically ragtime, and the life of Scott Joplin.Ī 1902 score of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” I presumed that the imagery associated with minstrelsy was normal and innocuous, just as I thought topless showgirls performing in my city’s casinos was. I don’t know about her, but I never once thought deeply about what the lyrics evoked: a “mask that grins and lies.” The entertainer I envisioned was a lot like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who looks happy tap-dancing alongside Shirley Temple in her childhood movie series. We created a duet and took turns singing the words. She’d never taken piano lessons, but she patiently learned the right-hand notes and I accompanied her with the left-hand part. My babysitter, who was 13 and also white, loved “The Entertainer” so much that she asked me to teach her how to play it. The lyrics on my sheet music described a clownish performer doing “snappy patter and jokes” that please “the folks.” I know I imagined a Black man on stage, but I didn’t know about minstrel shows or much else about America’s racist past and present. I didn’t feel sad when I played it, though I missed my dad fiercely instead, I felt indefatigable and industrious. ![]() I played it obsessively, perhaps because it occupied my hands and sounded jolly. Before and after school, I played “The Entertainer” on an out-of-tune piano in my mother’s classroom. I’d moved from Las Vegas to Reno with my mother, a kindergarten teacher. In 1991, when I was eight years old, I found a simplified version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and relished playing it for most of the year that I was in third grade. His compositions became more and more intricate, until they were almost jazz Bach.- Music publisher Edward B.
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