The New England Ragtime Ensemble

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The New England Ragtime Ensemble (originally The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble) was a Boston chamber orchestra dedicated to the music of Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.

Boston Capital city of Massachusetts, United States

Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles (124 km2) with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it also the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States.

Scott Joplin American composer, musician, and pianist

Scott Joplin was an African-American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime. During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.

Ragtime – also spelled rag-time or rag time – is a musical style that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1895 and 1918. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm.

Contents

History

Conservatory president Gunther Schuller created the 12-member student ensemble in 1972 for a festival of romantic American music, at which the group performed some of Schuller's own editions of orchestrated versions of Joplin's piano rags. These period arrangements from the collection "Standard High-Class Rags", commonly known in early accounts as the Red Backed Book (later shortened to The Red Back Book), had been preserved by New Orleans musician Bill Russell and forwarded to Schuller by pianist and music historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence. In 1973 the group's performance at the Smithsonian Institution [1] led to a recording for Angel Records. [2] Orchestrations for later repertoire included oboe, bassoon, French horn and guitar and banjo, a routine period practice.

Gunther Schuller American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, and jazz musician

Gunther Alexander Schuller was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian and jazz musician.

Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers administered by the United States government

The Smithsonian Institution, established on August 10, 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge," is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. The institution is named after its founding donor, British scientist James Smithson. Originally organized as the "United States National Museum," that name ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967.

Angel Records was a record label founded by EMI in 1953. It specialised in classical music, but included an occasional operetta or Broadway score. The Angel mark was used by EMI, its predecessors, and affiliated companies since 1898. EMI's classical-music operations were sold to Warner Music Group in 2013. The label is currently inactive since 2006, dissolving and reassigning Angel Records' artists and catalogues into its parent label EMI Classics and musical theatre artists and catalogues into Capitol Records. EMI Classics was sold and absorbed into Warner Classics.

The flute part to "The Red Back Book" ca. 1912 Cover page of the flute part to "The Red Back Book".jpg
The flute part to "The Red Back Book" ca. 1912

"The Red Back Book" earned a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of 1973. [4] [5] It spent 54 weeks on Billboard's Top 100 Albums List; 84 weeks on the Top Classical Albums List, including 6 separate appearances at #1; and 12 weeks on the Top Jazz Album List. It was the magazine's Top Classical Album of 1974. [6]

The Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance has been awarded since 1959. The award has had several minor name changes:

<i>Billboard</i> (magazine) American music magazine

Billboard is an American entertainment media brand owned by the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group, a division of Eldridge Industries. It publishes pieces involving news, video, opinion, reviews, events, and style, and is also known for its music charts, including the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, tracking the most popular songs and albums in different genres. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm, and operates several TV shows.

The ensemble's second recording, "More Scott Joplin Rags", spent 26 weeks on the Top Classical list, earning a #7 ranking for 5 weeks.

Beginning in 1973 the ensemble began a tour of major American and Canadian venues, including sold-out performances at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, [7] [8] where they would play seven more times; Tanglewood; [9] [10] the Blossom Music Center [11] [12] [13] and the Ravinia Festival; [14] the Newport Music Festival; [15] [16] [17] [18] the Saratoga Performing Arts Center [19] [20] as well as headlining the inaugural Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri. [21]

Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts performing arts center in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States

Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, is a performing arts center located on 117 acres (47 ha) of national park land in Fairfax County, Virginia, near the town of Vienna. Through a partnership and collaboration of the National Park Service and the non-profit Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, the Park offers both natural and cultural resources.

Tanglewood is a music venue in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. It has been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937. Tanglewood is also home to three music schools: the Tanglewood Music Center, Days in the Arts and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Besides classical music, Tanglewood hosts the Festival of Contemporary Music, jazz and popular artists, concerts, and frequent appearances by James Taylor, John Williams, and the Boston Pops.

Blossom Music Center

Blossom Music Center is an outdoor amphitheatre located in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The pavilion is composed of slate and tubular steel, and seats 6,051 people. Behind the pavilion is the general admission lawn, which can seat 15,000 people. Blossom is the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra, which performs its annual Blossom Festival there. The venue is also host to a full summer schedule of popular music acts and symphonic performances. It is owned by the Musical Arts Association, the orchestra's non-profit parent organization.

Following a series of performances in The Netherlands, [22] [23] in September 1974 they performed at a state dinner at the White House for President and Mrs. Gerald Ford. [24] [25]

Netherlands Constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Europe

The Netherlands is a country located mainly in Northwestern Europe. The European portion of the Netherlands consists of twelve separate provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. Including three island territories in the Caribbean Sea—Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba— it forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The official language is Dutch, but a secondary official language in the province of Friesland is West Frisian.

State dinner

A state dinner or state lunch is a dinner or banquet paid for by a government and hosted by a head of state in his or her official residence in order to renew and celebrate diplomatic ties between the host country and the country of a foreign head of state or head of government who was issued an invitation. It may form part of a state visit or diplomatic conference. In many countries around the world, there are many different rules governed by protocol. State dinners often consist of, but are not limited to, black tie or white tie dress, military honor guards, a four or five course meal, musical entertainment, dancing, and speeches made on behalf of the head of state hosting the state dinner as well as the foreign head of state.

White House Official residence and workplace of the President of the United States

The White House is the official residence and workplace of the President of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. and has been the residence of every U.S. President since John Adams in 1800. The term "White House" is often used as a metonym for the president and his advisers.

President Ford and the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble NECRE at White House.jpg
President Ford and the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble

The group continued to concertize extensively after 1974, becoming independent of the conservatory when Schuller left the school in 1977. He expanded their repertoire, adapting existing arrangements as well as arranging and transcribing the music of James Scott, Joseph Lamb, Louis Chauvin, Arthur Marshall, James Reese Europe, Jelly Roll Morton, Zez Confrey and Claude Debussy. Schuller later incorporated contemporary rags by William Albright, Stefan Kozinski, Kenneth Laufer, Rob Carriker, David Reffkin and one of his own compositions, Sandpoint Rag.

Joseph Lamb American composer of ragtime music

Joseph Francis Lamb was an American composer of ragtime music. Lamb, of Irish descent, was the only non-African American of the "Big Three" composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott. The ragtime of Joseph Lamb ranges from standard popular fare to complex and highly engaging. His use of long phrases was influenced by classical works he had learned from his sister and others while growing up, but his sense of structure was potentially derived from his study of Joplin's piano rags. By the time he added some polish to his later works in the 1950s, Lamb had mastered the classic rag genre in a way that almost no other composer was able to approach at that time, and continued to play it passably as well, as evidenced by at least two separate recordings done in his home, as well as a few recorded interviews.

Louis Chauvin American ragtime pianist

Louis Chauvin was an American ragtime musician.

James Reese Europe American jazz musician and United States Army officer

James Reese Europe, sometimes known as Jim Europe, was an American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the Black American music scene of New York City in the 1910s. Eubie Blake called him the "Martin Luther King of music".

Subsequent travel took the ensemble to 38 states and included performances at Symphony Hall, Boston; [27] Alice Tully Hall; [28] Carnegie Hall; the National Academy of Sciences (as part of the Jimmy Carter Inaugural Series); the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the Ambassador Auditorium; Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; and Stanford University, Temple University [29] [30] and UCLA.

They appeared on WGBH-TV and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston; WETA-TV in Virginia; WTIC-TV in Hartford; KENW (TV), New Mexico; [31] and performed live on NBC Today (Nov. 1, 1974) and A Prairie Home Companion (Jan. 18, 1986).

During these years tours took them to Canada, Italy, [32] Norway, Portugal and the former Soviet Union. [33] [34]

Their final performance on July 16, 1998, brought them back to the stage on which they had debuted, Jordan Hall at The New England Conservatory. [35]

Members

The original ensemble

(* at the first performance only; Myron Romanul was the pianist for "Scott Joplin: The Red Back Book" and in ensuing concerts)

Other notable players

Discography

As The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble

Reissues of The Red Back Book

As The New England Ragtime Ensemble

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

The 16th Annual Grammy Awards were held March 2, 1974, and were broadcast live on American television. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the year 1973.

Joe Maneri American composer, jazz musician and microtonal innovator

Joseph Gabriel Esther Maneri, was an American jazz composer, saxophone and clarinet player. Violinist Mat Maneri is his son.

Maple Leaf Rag rag by Scott Joplin

The "Maple Leaf Rag" is an early ragtime musical composition for piano composed by Scott Joplin. It was one of Joplin's early works, and became the model for ragtime compositions by subsequent composers. It is one of the most famous of all ragtime pieces. As a result Joplin was called the "King of Ragtime". The piece gave Joplin a steady if unspectacular income for the rest of his life.

Jordan Hall

Jordan Hall is a 1,051-seat concert hall in Boston, Massachusetts, the principal performance space of the New England Conservatory. It is one block from Boston's Symphony Hall, and together they are considered two of America's most acoustically perfect performance spaces. It is the only conservatory building in the United States to be designated a National Historic Landmark.

<i>Treemonisha</i> 1911 opera by Scott Joplin

Treemonisha (1911) is an opera by African-American composer Scott Joplin, who is most noted for his ragtime piano works. Though it encompasses a wide range of musical styles other than ragtime, and Joplin did not refer to it as such, it is sometimes incorrectly referred to as a "ragtime opera". The music of Treemonisha includes an overture and prelude, along with various recitatives, choruses, small ensemble pieces, a ballet, and a few arias.

The Entertainer (rag) piano rag by Scott Joplin

"The Entertainer" is a 1902 classic piano rag written by Scott Joplin. It was sold first as sheet music, and in the 1910s as piano rolls that would play on player pianos. The first recording was by blues and ragtime musicians, the Blue Boys in 1928, played on mandolin and guitar.

Edwin Barker is an American double bass player who graduated from the New England Conservatory. He is Principal Double Bass with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Associate Professor of Music at Boston University College of Fine Arts.

Joshua Rifkin is an American conductor, keyboard player, and musicologist, and is currently a Professor of Music at Boston University. As a performer he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas, and as a scholar has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century. He is famed among classical musicians and aficionados for his increasingly influential theory that most of Bach's choral works were sung with only one singer per choral line. Rifkin argued: "So long as we define 'chorus' in the conventional modern sense, then Bach's chorus, with few exceptions, simply did not exist." He is best known by the general public, however, for having played a central role in the ragtime revival in the 1970s, with the three albums he recorded of Scott Joplin's works for Nonesuch Records.

Richard “Dick” Zimmerman is a ragtime performer, historian, author and producer. He is regarded as being one of the key figures responsible for the worldwide revival of ragtime. Zimmerman is the only pianist to have recorded the complete works of Scott Joplin and in 1987 was awarded the first place prize “Champion Ragtime Performer of the World”. Zimmerman was technical advisor for the films Scott Joplin and Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime Composers. He is a founder of the "Maple Leaf Club", and is the editor of its publication, "The Rag Times". Zimmerman is also a professional magician. He has contributed many signature illusions to the field of magic and has acted as consultant for such magicians as David Copperfield.

Phoebe Carrai is an American cellist.

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Frog Legs Rag

"Frog Legs Rag" is a classic rag composed by James Scott and published by John Stillwell Stark in December 1906. It was James Scott's first commercial success. Prior to this composition Scott had published marches. With "Frog Legs Rag", Scott embarked upon a career as a successful and important ragtime songwriter.

The Borromeo String Quartet is an American string quartet, in residence at the New England Conservatory since 1992. They have performed throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia, at numerous festivals and in many distinguished chamber music series. They are named after the Borromean Islands.

The Ragtime Dance

"The Ragtime Dance" is a piece of ragtime music by Scott Joplin, first published in 1902.

Trebor Jay Tichenor was a recognized authority on Scott Joplin and the ragtime era. He collected and published others' ragtime piano compositions and composed his own. He authored books about ragtime, and both on his own and as a member of The St. Louis Ragtimers, became a widely known ragtime pianist.

Tibor Józef Pusztai Hungarian violinist, composer, conductor, and teacher

Tibor Józef Pusztai was a Hungarian violinist, composer, conductor, and teacher. He directed and performed with various orchestras around the world, winning multiple awards thanks to his performances and compositions. Tibor Pusztai died on January 10th, 2016.

References

  1. ↑ "Bringing Back Ragtime". The Washington Post. February 12, 1973. pp. B 1.
  2. ↑ http://www.discogs.com/Scott-Joplin-The-Red-Back-Book/release/722342
  3. ↑ Courtesy of David Reffkin, The American Ragtime Ensemble Collection. One of only two known complete sets extant.
  4. ↑ Robert A. McLean (March 5, 1974). "Schuller's kinetic kids win Grammy". The Boston Evening Globe.
  5. ↑ http://www.grammy.com/nominees/search?artist=schuller%2C+gunther&title=Joplin%3A+the+red+back+book&year=1973&genre=5
  6. ↑ http://www.billboard.com/archive#/archive
  7. ↑ Joseph McLellan (June 24, 1974). "Joplin". The Washington Post.
  8. ↑ Boris Weintraub (June 24, 1974). "Ragtime Keeps Off the Chill". The Washington Star-News. pp. C-4.
  9. ↑ "New England Newsclip". The Boston Globe. August 12, 1974.
  10. ↑ Jay C. Rosenfeld (August 12, 1974). "Tanglewood weekend spans musical gamut". The Berkshire Eagle.
  11. ↑ Robert Finn (July 11, 1974). "Joplin's rags coming to Blossom Tuesday". The Plain Dealer.
  12. ↑ Wilma Salisbury (July 17, 1974). "Scott Joplin is paid lively tribute". The Plain Dealer. pp. 6-C.
  13. ↑ John Von Rhein (July 17, 1974). "Young Ragtimers Pound Out Some Instant Euphoria". The Akron Beacon Journal. pp. D2.
  14. ↑ "The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble". The Chicago Tribune. June 18, 1974.
  15. ↑ "The Ragtime Revival-A Belated Ode to Composer Scott Joplin". The New York Times. August 11, 1974. pp. D 1.
  16. ↑ Peter D. Lennon (July 29, 1974). "Ragtime at The Breakers". The Providence Journal-Bulletin. pp. B 1.
  17. ↑ Edwin Safford (July 29, 1974). "Ragtime Brightens Breakers". The Providence Journal-Bulletin.
  18. ↑ Rose Walsh (July 31, 1974). "A Bright Evening at 'The Breakers'". The Boston Herald-American.
  19. ↑ Greg Johnson (June 18, 1974). "Rain fails to dampen spirits of small crowd at SPAC show". The Saratogan. pp. B 1.
  20. ↑ Steve Hirsch (June 26, 1974). "Scott Joplin's 'Entertainer' Finally Reaches Hit Parade". KITE Guide to Art and Entertainment. p. 2.
  21. ↑ Hubert Saal (August 5, 1974). "Glad Rags". Newsweek. p. 60.
  22. ↑ "Ragtime, de nieuwe rage". De Telegraaf. September 10, 1973.
  23. ↑ "Melancholiek accent bij ragtime-concert". De Volkskrant van Vrijag. September 13, 1973.
  24. ↑ "New Englanders at the White House". The Boston Globe. September 27, 1974. p. 42.
  25. ↑ http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/whphotos/19740925whpo.pdf |Pp.17-19, 21-23
  26. ↑ Courtesy of Mark Belair.
  27. ↑ Ray Murphy (March 11, 1975). "Ragtime sells out symphony". The Boston Globe.
  28. ↑ Speight Jenkins (May 5, 1974). "Joplin's 'Red Back Book' at Alice Tully Hall". The New York Post.
  29. ↑ Daniel Webster (June 22, 1974). "Troupe Revives Ragtime At the Temple Festival". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
  30. ↑ "Schuller's Ragtime Ensemble Joyously Plays the Music of Joplin". The Evening Bulletin. June 21, 1974. p. 27.
  31. ↑ "Ragtime sounds performed on Channel 3 this Sunday". The Portales News-Tribune. February 20, 1987.
  32. ↑ "Il rag del New England". La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. September 27, 1983.
  33. ↑ George McKinnon (July 16, 1978). "Schuller makes rags the rage of Russia". The Boston Globe.
  34. ↑ David Willis (June 26, 1978). "Soviets sample ragtime rhythm". The Christian Science Monitor.
  35. ↑ Susan Larson (September 16, 1998). "Schuller charms with the lilt of ragtime". The Boston Globe.
  36. ↑ Martin Mayer (August 1974). "Recordings". Esquire. p. 30.
  37. ↑ Alan Rich (June 10, 1974). "The Lively Arts: Rags To Rip-Offs". New York Magazine. p. 80. The ensemble is marvelous; you know that every member is a superb technician, and yet together they have worked out an insinuating way of slurring and sliding - like the Vienna Philharmonic playing Johann Strauss - that gives the music marvelous warmth.
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