Maple Leaf Rag

Collaborate on that a little bit.

Ragtime had been played for nobody knows how long prior to Scott Joplin publishing Maple Leaf Rag or in Sedalia, Missouri in the 1890s.

um late 1890s and that becoming a huge sheet music success um so yeah ragtime kind of is one of those things a bit like blues where it just it's somewhere in the midst of time the origins of it but it was um scott joplin was one of one of the people who wanted to formalize it as a as a as a black music form and um like i said it coincided with the um mass production of sheet music, which didn't really exist until the very end of the 19th century.

If you want to buy a piece of music by Stephen Foster when he was writing O Susanna and Camptown Races, that probably would have been handwritten if you went to your local music shop.

Sure

... throw us some Maple Leaf Rag or the Chrysanthemum Rag.

Well-

Does it have to all be The Entertainer?

It was a fad.

People were excited about ragtime, were told that the Maple Leaf Rag sold a million copies in sheet music, which is an extraordinary thing, not just for the numbers, but also because it's an extremely difficult work.

It's hard to imagine there were a million people in the United States that could play it.

So the ragtime phenomena happened first, and it's most important for people the rhythmic intensity of the music.

It actually backs up further with my interest in ragtime music.

So when I was 10 years old, I was taking piano lessons and my piano teacher was noticing that I was getting fed up with classical music playing nothing but Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, you know, all the good stuff that as any musician should they should be playing that stuff to not only build their chops but also to get an appreciation for the music and i was at that teetering point where i wasn't really having fun with it anymore and it was the make or break moment of i either will stop and that'll be the end of me playing piano or i need to have something that really catches my interest which drives me further and my piano teacher one day said okay as a break from playing chopin etude after chopin etude i'm going to give you a piece of music by scott joplin called the maple leaf rag and i immediately started to sit down the piano and play it and i was hooked the syncopation the fun liveliness of ragtime caught me in a way that classical music at the time really didn't and i went home and i asked my mother who's also a pianist do we have any music by the scott joplin fellow and she ended up pulling out a copy of the Entertainer that she had, and I started going down that road.

Fast forward a few years, I had put on a couple of benefit concerts to raise money for some scholarship funds, and was playing Ragtime fairly seriously.

I hadn't made it onto the Ragtime circuit yet, but was really getting interested.