THE ENTERTAINER Clarinet Quartet

THE ENTERTAINER Clarinet Quartet - Arrangement by Everardo García

Scott Joplin was an African-American composer and pianist. He was born in Texarkana, Texas, on November 24, 1868, and died in Manhattan, New York, on April 1, 1917. He brought ragtime to formal perfection, pieces with syncopated rhythms very popular in the early decades of the 20th century in the United States, in which a rhythmic sense close to that of jazz can be appreciated. His Maple Leaf Rag (1899) for piano was a huge success. The opera Treemonisha (1911), a blend of African American rhythms, ragtime, and Italian opera, was his most ambitious work.

Scott Joplin, unlike other contemporary musicians, had a very solid classical musical training, which was reflected in his tendency to achieve formal balance based on the use of very similar tonalities. Her rags use various rhythms and generally include four repeated 16-bar themes, with an introduction and modulation before the third theme. Behind the profusion of irregular, arpeggiated sounds, there is always a catchy melody that follows the classic antecedent-consequent phrase pattern, thus dividing the eight-bar melody into two interrelated parts. Otherwise, her rags lack passages of development.

Her music was rediscovered and regained popularity in the early 1970s with the release of Joshua Rifkin’s album, which sold one million copies. This was followed by the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Sting, which featured several of her compositions, most notably The Entertainer. The opera Treemonisha was finally fully produced in 1972, and Joplin was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976.