Monday Musicale with the Maestro – July 20, 2020 – Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime (1867/1868? – April 1, 1917)

In memory of civil rights activist John Lewis, we offer music from Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha–the story of an African-American woman and community activist in the post-Civil War South.

 
Maestro William Henry Curry’s introductory comments for this week:

Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime (1867/1868? – April 1, 1917)

Scott Joplin’s father was born a slave in North Carolina. After emancipation the family moved to the Texas-Arkansas border where Scott was born and became a child prodigy as a pianist.  It was his dream to become a classical pianist, an impossible dream for an African-American in that place and time.  Yet destiny led him to become the first great composer of ragtime.  Named for its “ragged time,” this music features non-traditional,  irregular rhythms.  Joplin wrote dozens of rags for the piano, and soon his infectious rhythms and strong melodic gift had  people humming and tapping their toes the world over.  In 1899 his “Maple Leaf Rag” created a sensation, initiating the ragtime craze that would last till the early 1920’s and can be seen as a precursor of jazz.

His one large-scale classical work was the opera Treemonisha, set in the 1880’s in an African-American village like Joplin’s own near the Texas-Arkansas border.  Named for its remarkable heroine (an abandoned child discovered under a tree by a former slave), the opera traces Treemonisha’s growth as a community activist on a plantation, spreading her message to her people that education is the key to equality and achievement.

The opera’s musical masterpiece is its finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” named after a dance (the “slow drag”) which called for dragging one foot at a time across the floor. In his finale, Joplin actually choreographs the dance himself, instructing the singers exactly which steps to perform.  Our featured sopranos are Rozlyn Sorrell and Tina Morris-Anderson, local treasures renowned for their singing and acting.

In 2018, since Joplin’s orchestration for this opera has never been found, I asked the brilliant young teacher, composer, and conductor Oakley Lyon to write an orchestration for the Durham Symphony Orchestra.  His remarkable work is authentically modeled on the period arrangements of Joplin’s era.

Here is our performance of “A Real Slow Drag” from Sunday, March 3, 2019, at the Hayti Heritage Center, part of our concert titled Songs of the South: A Celebration of Southern Artistic Creativity. 

William Henry Curry
Music Director, Durham Symphony Orchestra

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