He had a line printed on his scores: "It is never right to play ragtime fast." For a century almost nobody has listened.
Joplin was born around 1868 in north-east Texas, to a father who had been enslaved and a mother who was free. A neighbour let him practise on a piano; he could play very young, and also studied violin and singing.
In his twenties he made a living around Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri — teaching by day, playing in social clubs at night. In 1899 a Sedalia music-store owner agreed to publish his Maple Leaf Rag, paying him a penny a copy. It sold hundreds of thousands, became the first instrumental sheet music to pass a million, and made him the first Black composer to live on his royalties.
Popularity was not what he was after. Ragtime was then heard as vulgar dance-hall music, and he insisted it was serious work: every piece built as a structured multi-strain form, every score printed with an instruction not to play it fast, and no improvising — play what is written, and add nothing.
His last years went into an opera, Treemonisha, with an all-Black cast and a story about education as deliverance. Nobody would produce it. In 1915 he paid for a run-through with no scenery, no orchestra and himself at the piano; the audience was cool. He died in New York two years later, aged forty-nine.
He waited fifty-six years. In 1973 the film The Sting used his The Entertainer and the record sold enormously; in 1976 Treemonisha was finally staged, and that same year he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Ragtime splits the hands in a way you can hear at once: the left is regular, the right is displaced. The left plays a steady bass-chord-bass-chord, like someone walking beside you; the right puts its accents deliberately into the gaps the left leaves. That displacement is what the word rag means.
The second mark is the strains. A Joplin piece is not one tune repeated but four or so complete tunes taking turns, sixteen bars each, each with its own character, usually with one change of key along the way. If it feels like a different piece has started, that is the design.
The third is that his music is not fast. He said so in print, and the slower it goes the more clearly you hear how the right hand wedges into the left hand's gaps. Played fast the two hands smear together and only the bustle survives.
