Scott Joplin

Each month, we feature a famous composer who has left their mark on the history of music. In these interviews, they tell us their story, and what inspired them to compose their most memorable works. This is your chance to find out more, and get free sheet music of some of their finest tracks! This month, we give the floor to the great American composer Scott Joplin.

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Composer of the month: Scott Joplin

I don't really know when I was born. Not surprising, since I come from a black family in Texas in the 1860s, knowing when I was born is the least of my worries. All I know is that in 1870, I was two years old.

My father, Giles Joplin, grew up in slavery. My mother, Florence Givins, did not. That said, she was a maid and washerwoman for a wealthy white family - in those days that wasn't far from slavery. My father was a violinist, my mother a banjoist and singer, and my five brothers and sisters played guitar, trumpet or sang.

For me, it was the piano. My family was rather poor, so I didn't go to school. I remember accompanying my mother when she went to clean the neighbors' houses. I understand now that this was simply to prevent me from bothering her, but she always stuck me in front of the piano. So, self-taught, I learned. I owe her a lot. Despite our poverty, my father gave me a piano and lessons with Julius Weiss, my first music teacher. He taught me composition and harmony, and took me on a journey through European musical genres, particularly opera.

Please Say You Will

This short waltz is Scott Joplin's very first work, published in 1895. It's not a testament to his style - for it's a waltz, not a rag - but it is a testament to the composer's classical education: the vocal part demands an almost lyrical interpretation.

Scott Joplin's extremely precise musical technique is already apparent. It has to be said, however, that this piece could have been written by any number of composers, especially European ones. It remains a very promising piece for the composer, who was only 27 at the time.

I left the family cocoon at a very young age. I just wanted to get out there. I played cornet for the Queen City Concert Band and piano at the Maple Leaf and the Black 400. The odd thing about playing in a bar is that people don't listen to you. I took the opportunity to shape my style and lay the foundations of ragtime: syncopating rhythms, fusing my different sensibilities. I published my very first work in 1895, Please Say You Will. I then resumed my music studies at George R. Smith College in Sedalia. There was a sign on the door: "Blacks Only".

Then, at the end of the 1890s, I published my first real ragtime for piano, Original Rag, which unfortunately was very poorly received by the public. Fortune, however, smiled upon me, for shortly afterwards I published Maple Leaf Rag, one of the best-selling ragtimes in the world! A million copies - I couldn't believe it myself. I congratulated myself on having wanted to work with a lawyer on the release of this piece: I was guaranteed to earn 1 cent per sale. That doesn't sound like much, but with a million sales, it was more than enough.

With this success, I put all my energy into ragtime. The style was conquering the country, and I was dubbed "The King of Ragtime"! Thus were born The Entertainer, The Ragtime Dance and Peacherine Rag.

The Maple Leaf Rag

Maple Leaf Rag in A flat major is one of Scott Joplin's best-known ragtimes. In fact, it could easily be said to be the best-known ragtime at all. Indeed, soon after its release, it became a kind of model for future ragtime composers.

This piece is quite remarkable, for from the very first note, Joplin leaps straight into a frantic rythm that doesn't stop until the very last. What also makes this piece so difficult is the melody's counter-beat repetition. Syncopated rhythms are characteristic of ragtime and Scott Joplin's style, as is the AA-BB-A-CC-DD structure, similar to his other pieces.

You'll need excellent left-hand coordination to get through this piece (there are occasional two-octave leaps!). The "Gladiolus Rag", a later Joplin composition, is a developed variant of the "Maple Leaf Rag" that showcases Joplin's growing musical sophistication, and is usually played at a slightly slower rythm .

There were several women in my life. The first was Bella Hayden, whom I married in 1901 but divorced in 1904. Then, on June 14, 1904, I married Freddie Alexander. She was beautiful, her night-black curly hair giving a serious air to her sparkling youth. A few months later, on September 10, she died of pneumonia and influenza. I dedicated a piece to her, a waltz, Bethena, in which I recount my relationship with Freddie. I don't know why I wrote it; I can't play it. It's too hard, too sad.

This marked the beginning of a dark period: my career declined and my financial situation deteriorated, being very poorly paid despite the success of my works. In 1907, after a few years in St. Louis doing one odd job after another to make a living, I decided to go to Chicago to work with Louis Chauvin on a slow rag called Heliotrope Bouquet. Then I went to New York to seek financing for my opera Treemonisha. There I met my friend Joseph Lamb (who went on to become one of the world's greatest ragtime composers).

While I was publishing all my works with Stark, I wanted to change publishers. So I turned to Seminary Music, where I published my beginner's ragtime method, School of Ragtime.

Sun Flower Slow Drag

Sun Flower Slow Drag, published in 1901 and billed at the time as "the Maple Leaf Rag's little sister", is firmly rooted in the style for which Scott Joplin was famous, even though it was co-composed with Scott Hayden. It's a cheerful piece, a real ray of sunshine, typical of Joplin's joyful compositions. This joy in the music can be attributed to the fact that at the same time Scott Joplin was courting his first wife, Belle, who was the widow of Hayden's brother.

With a structure typical of Scott Joplin's rags and a coda remarkably similar to that of The Entertainer, this 4-minute track has nothing to envy of Joplin's ultra-famous compositions.

In 1911, I published my opera Treemonisha. This piece is particularly close to my heart. It's a piece of my own history, a tribute to my mother and to Freddie.

Treemonisha, the opera's main character, is the only educated African-American woman in her village, reflecting my belief that racial equality would come through education. Let's educate ourselves, let's cultivate ourselves, let's enlighten ourselves, and never again will humans treat other humans as their inferiors. Perhaps it's utopian, but we must resolutely give black people the chance to educate themselves, rather than relegating them to poor neighborhoods and letting them die of despair.

Twenty years ago, when the illustrious Czech composer Dvorak came to live in the United States on an all-expenses-paid basis, I had to finance my opera myself. I was poor, yet I had to pay for the publication of my work and its reduction for piano and voice myself. All my life I played in bars and brothels to feed myself. My music, which I considered classical, was called "saloon music". And my masterpiece, my only opera, never saw the light of day.

Treemonisha scores close to my heart, I sink into illness. One thought haunts me: was I just a black man who played the piano?

Treemonisha, Overture

Treemonisha is Scott Joplin's only opera. It pays tribute to his mother and his second wife Freddie, and tackles the issue of racial equality, as well as featuring a black woman guiding an entire population.

Beyond being a resolutely political work, Treemonisha demonstrates an interesting musical complexity. Indeed, the piece is often presented as a "Ragtime Opera". However, it is much more than that. While we find the syncopated figures so dear to Scott Joplin, we also hear slave songs and gospel blending with salon music, operetta and European opera.

This work is clearly the masterpiece of Scott Joplin's repertoire. On the one hand, it's a sort of melting pot of all the genres that influenced Scott Joplin; on the other, it's a witness to its time, dealing with an issue that may still be unresolved today.

Some claimed that Scott Joplin was one of the world's finest pianists, others that he played slowly but with great precision. In 1916, Scott Joplin's health took a terrible turn for the worse. Having been ill with syphilis for probably twenty years, he sank into schyzophrenia. He ended his life in a psychiatric hospital in New York, where he died on April 1, 1917, at the age of 48. Although he was recognized as a ragtime genius, ragtime itself was not recognized as a legitimate style. Yet Scott Joplin injected his compositions with the care of a refined musical education, largely inspired by European sounds and markedly borrowed from the style of Chopin.

It was not until 1972 that Treemonisha was premiered in concert, and 1975 for the opera version. He was an exceptional musician.

We finally know his date of birth, ironically, in his epitaph: November 24, 1868.