Joplin Scott, *24 November 1868 Texarkana (Texas), †1 April 1917 New York City, American composer and pianist. His love for music was instilled in him from his family home; his father played the violin, his mother played the banjo, and his brothers sang, composed, and played the guitar. At the age of eight, he became interested in playing the piano, and then, three years later he started attending free music theory lessons in Texarkana. In 1882 he left his family home and travelled around Texas as an itinerant musician. In 1885 he was in the Saint Louis area, where he was working alongside other ragtime pioneers such as T. Turpin, A. Marshall, and L. Chauvin. He performed at the Chicago World’s Exposition in 1893; he also managed a small ensemble during this period. In 1895 he settled in Sedalia, where he studied harmony and composition at the George R. Smith College for Negroes. His first compositions, the songs A Picture of Her Face and Please Say You Will, were published in 1895; his first ragtime, Original Rag, was published in 1899. In the same year, J. Stark, who was a publisher and promoter of Joplin’s work, published his best-known composition, The Maple Leaf Rag. This was Joplin’s first significant success. The income generated by the sale of more than a million copies of this work allowed him to give up performing in venues and concentrate on composing. From 1900–05 he lived in Saint Louis. He wrote many well-known works at the time, among others, Easy Winners, A Breeze from Alabama, The Entertainer, and Weeping Willow. In 1902 he composed a twenty-five-minute ballet, Ragtime Dance; in 1903, the first Joplin’s opera, The Guest of Honor, was written and was performed only once in the same year in Saint Luis (the composition went missing, and the authenticity of the found fragments of instrumental parts is thought to be questionable). In 1906, the composer moved to Chicago and then to New York. There he began to work on Treemonisha, the three-act opera, which was published in 1911 in form of a piano reduction. The staging of the work in 1915 was a fiasco, which deepened the composer’s psychological crisis. Joplin was still working on a symphony based on ragtime themes before his death. In 1916 he was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, where he died a year later.
Joplin is the most prominent representative of ragtime, a style of popular music that developed in America at the end of the last century and later became an important element of the emerging jazz. He was one of the extremely prolific artists. He wrote two operas, ballet, symphony (probably Piano Concerto), more than 50 ragtime pieces, (some people believe that he composed around 600 of them), School of Ragtime, marches, songs, and made numerous arrangements. Despite being considered the “King of Ragtime” in time, his ambition was to create larger forms; he aspired to be a composer in the European sense, laying the foundations for the development of new American music. This is evident in his works from the last years of his life, in which, on the one hand, he attempted to bring certain elements of classical forms into ragtime (Euphonie Sounds, Magnetic Rag), while on the other hand, he tried to combine the achievements of European opera with the African American tradition and ragtime motifs (Treemonisha). Joplin’s efforts in this field were almost ignored by his contemporaries, and for more than half a century he remained a forgotten artist. The sudden surge of interest in his music occurred only in the early 1970s. During this time, Treemonisha was successfully performed (Atlanta, 1972), nearly all of his compositions were released, and the original piano recordings of Joplin were captured on records, which were discovered by the researcher R. Blesh. The film The Sting (directed by G.R. Hill, 1973) also contributed to the popularity of his music, and the Entertainer, used there as a main theme, soon became a worldwide hit.
Literature: V.B. Lawrence The Collected Works of Scott Joplin, New York City 1971; P. Gammond Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Era, New York City 1975; J. Haskins, K. Benson Scott Joplin. The Man Who Made Ragtime, New York City 1978.
