![]() ![]() ![]() For the amateur instrumentalist, the 20 th century became the age of the guitar, and in a music history class of 23 I recently taught, not a single one of the students had ever played the piano. This had kept them a minority taste among pianists even in their prime, and today they are even less accessible given that ever fewer people play the piano. The elegant ragtime pieces Joplin wrote better than anyone else are as difficult to play as they are lovely to hear. Before long, ragtime had gone back to what it had been since the 1940s and what it remains today: a hobby lovingly cultivated by a small, expert fan base. Gone are the days when LPs of ragtime in endless permutations were legion in record stores, when the music pattern on the wrapping paper of a gift I was given was not Mozart or Beethoven but, in fact, staves from one of Joplin’s lesser-known rags, when anyone who went near a piano would at least attempt the first page of “The Entertainer.” Classical pianist Joshua Rifkin’s recordings in the early ’70s of Joplin’s rags, played accurately and majestically in a concert hall, helped establish Joplin as a composer to take seriously-but only one of those LPs was even transferred to CD.Įven by the early ’80s when I discovered ragtime through the abovementioned kinds of experiences, those LPs in the record bins were dusty and priced low. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (2 nd edition) ![]()
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