Two piano rags arranged for brass ensemble by John Iveson

Bethena

Easy Winners

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 epidemic 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.

Bethena, the first of these two Joplin pieces arranged by John Iveson for brass ensemble, is a rare example of a piano rag in waltz time. Written shortly after the death of his wife Freddie, to whom he had been married for only two or three months, it is thought to be some kind of memorial to his young bride - which, bearing in mind the haunting quality of the tunes and the almost Chopinesque minor-key episode towards the end, it could well be. Of the piano rags featured in The Sting - including also Pineapple Rag, Gladiolus Rag and Rag-Time Dance - The Easy Winners was a particularly apt choice, though more for its title than for any get-rich-quick element in the music itself. In fact, it is an entirely straight example of its regular two-step kind, the syncopations in the melodic line as characteristic in their way as the even quavers sustained in the accompaniment almost throughout.