(Albright and I performed rags widely for many years, including classic rags and those of our own composition.) Few of us would continue to write traditional rags after about 1975, but in the ragtime revival of the late sixties we younger composers internalized rag in such a way that our subsequent music became profoundly changed, whatever styles we each pursued later. It was all delightful for us-playing these new-old pieces in concert had always elicited warm responses from audiences-but I think we all felt the real impetus from our picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition.

(Even the senior George Rochberg, not known for interest in popular music, caught the fever in one of his piano suites.) Bill Albright and I would send each other rags by mail like chess problems. What may be less well known is that from about 1968 onwards a whole group of young American composers-Peter Winkler, William Albright and several others-joined me in writing new tradition-style rags. Soon after, Joshua Rifkin (for whom I played Joplin rags at a party) would record Joplin rags on Nonesuch, and Gunther Schuller laid onto disc the period instrumentations of the composer’s music (found in Joplin’s publisher John Stark’s The Red Back Book, the source for the music in the film The Sting) Joplin’s obscurity would be no more. All of a sudden Joplin was beginning to be discovered throughout the music world. When he said ‘I have a copy of the vocal score-shall I bring it next week?’ I nearly fell off my chair.įrom this happy event came my exploration of Joplin’s rags (courtesy of Rudi’s friend, the ragtime specialist Max Morath) as well as of the whole field of turn-of-the-nineteenth-to-twentieth-century piano ragtime, now known as classic rags. We had barely ever said hello to one another before as we routinely rushed in and out of the same crowded office on the way to teaching, but one week I asked him if he knew where I could find a copy of the opera, as all the usual suspects had nothing. Then I asked my office mate Rudi Blesh at Queens College in New York City. ‘Who is that?’ I asked-few people in the 1967 musical world knew the name Scott Joplin-and Norman told me Joplin was the composer of the Maple Leaf Rag, but that his opera existed only in legend.įor some reason I immediately went on the trail of Treemonisha, only to find that no one even at the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center or the Schomburg Center in Harlem had it all asked me to let them know if I found a score.

One day in the autumn of 1967 I had lunch with Norman Lloyd, then-head of the arts division of the Rockefeller Foundation, who mentioned having heard of a ragtime opera by Scott Joplin. It’s a wonderful, revelatory, and, above all, really enjoyable listen from start to finish. If you don’t know the music of William Bolcom, this disc should absolutely be your starting point. There’s wit and humour aplenty, tempered, when needed, by tenderness and poignancy, whimsy, much charm and ingenious invention. ‘After his sparkling C P E Bach disc, released on the Hyperion label in January 2022, Marc-André Hamelin, that fearless master of the piano who seems to be able to playing anything (and I mean anything!) moves seamlessly from the precision and clarity of early classical keyboard music to an album of piano rags, written over the last 50 or so years, by American composer William Bolcom … all are distinctive, appealing in their references back to Joplin’s model, but with multiple moods and harmonies, and brilliantly presented by Hamelin, who seems to really relish this repertoire (and if you didn’t know it, listening to him you’d never guess he’s a classical pianist-there’s a natural jazz insouciance to Hamelin’s playing throughout the disc).

William bolcom ragtime