Trivia / Scott Joplin

• Missing Episode: The opera A Guest of Honor received good reviews, but the score was confiscated by Joplin's creditors after a robbery made them unable to pay for their touring fees. Sadly, it's now considered lost.
• Revival by Commercialization: After Joplin's death in 1917, his music was obscure for many years until it was featured in the soundtrack for the movie The Sting. The soundtrack album placed at #1 on the Billboard charts, and the score won an Academy Award, sparking more serious interest in Joplin's music.
• Write What You Know: The story of Treemonisha is set quite specifically in 1884, about a girl born in 1866, "on a plantation somewhere in the State of Arkansas, North-east of the Town of Texarkana and three or four miles from the Red River"— which so happens to be exactly where and when Scott Joplin himself was born and raised. Some scholars speculate that the very detailed prose backstory Joplin provided about Treemonisha's birth and parentage may have an element of autobiography to it as well.
• What Could Have Been: As Ragtime was falling out of popularity and Jazz was replacing it, Joplin, unlike many of his contemporaries like Eubie Blake, did not move over to Jazz. Rather, Joplin had begun to get interested in classical music and music theory. His final composition, Magnetic Rag, was his most musically complex ragtime, with layered melodies and unusual chord progressions. Unfortunately, it was a slower rag that was almost melancholy in places, and was a big contrast with the more upbeat and boisterous Jazz playing. Magnetic Rag wasn't well received at the time - purportedly, it was booed and Joplin left the stage in tears, never to compose or perform again before his death 3 years later. Decades later, Magnetic Rag is one of his more popular compositions, but there's nothing to do except speculate as to what direction Joplin's composing would have taken if he'd continued.

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