Maple Leaf Rag (edited by Gunther Schuller)

The Entertainer (arranged by D.S. Delisle, edited by Gunter Schuller)

Scott Joplin – like his younger contemporary Charles Ives and like Stephen Foster in a previous generation – was one of the prophets of American music. Although he didn’t invent ragtime, he was one of its most resourceful exponents and about the only one with both the ambition and the ability to elevate the piano rag to the status of classical piano music on a similar scale. Forgotten for decades after his death, the revival of interest in classic ragtime in the 1970s led to a widespread rediscovery of his music – including his hitherto unstaged opera Treemonisha – and made him the unlikely recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. The most decisive boost to his posthumous reputation, accelerating the Joplin craze to endemic proportions, was the 1989 film The Sting, which featured The Entertainer in the title track as well as several other rags later in the film.

Although Joplin’s career was far from a rags-to-riches story – he wasn’t as good at making money as making music – he did became, as he predicted, “the king of ragtime writers.” His confidence was based on one of his earliest pieces, Maple Leaf Rag, written in 1899 when he was working at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri. He was billed there as “The Entertainer,” which explains the title of the most popular of his more than 40 rags. Basically a two step, The Entertainer, like the similarly syncopated Maple Leaf Rag, is a brilliantly entertaining study in the “ragged movement” which, Joplin declared, gave ragtime its name.