The Entertainer – Scott Joplin (Joshua Rifkin / 1974)

Description

Additional information about this, Scott Joplin vinyl art.

Scott Joplin – The Artist

Scott Joplin (1868 – 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Dubbed the “King of Ragtime”, he composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the “Maple Leaf Rag”, became the genre’s first and most influential hit, later being recognised as the quintessential rag.[ Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music meant to be played in concert halls and largely disdained the performance of ragtime as honky tonk music most common in saloons.

Joshua Rifkin (born 1944) is an American conductor, pianist, and musicologist. He is currently a professor of music at Boston University.[ As a performer he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas; as a scholar has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century. He is best known for playing a central role in the ragtime revival in the 1970s, with the three albums he recorded of Scott Joplin’s works for Nonesuch Records.

The Entertainer – The Song

‘The Entertainer’  is a 1902 classic piano rag written by Scott Joplin. It was sold first as sheet music by John Stark & Son of St. Louis, Missouri, 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. As one of the classics of ragtime, it returned to international prominence as part of the ragtime revival in the 1970s, when it was used as the theme music for the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Sting. “The Entertainer” is subtitled “A Rag Time Two Step”, which was a form of dance popular until about 1911, and a style which was common among rags written at the time. The piano rag has been covered my many musicians. Tis particular record is by Joshua Rifkin.

The Musical Keyboard – The Shape

This record has been modelled into a section of a musical keyboard. A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeats at the interval of an octave. Pressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine (acoustic and electric piano, clavichord), plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or activating an electronic circuit (synthesiser, digital piano, electronic keyboard). Since the most commonly encountered keyboard instrument is the piano, the keyboard layout is often referred to as the piano keyboard or simply piano keys.

The Sting is a 1973 American caper film set in September 1936, involving a complicated plot by two professional grifters (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) to con a mob boss (Robert Shaw). The film was directed by George Roy Hill,[3] who had previously directed Newman and Redford in the Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and written by screenwriter David S. Ward, inspired by real-life cons perpetrated by brothers Fred and Charley Gondorff and documented by David Maurer in his 1940 book The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man.

Need Help?  Contact Us