From The Ragtime Ephemeralist to Rusty Brown
For some time now I have wanted to interview Chris Ware for The Syncopated Times. Over the years I have found myself frequently reaching for his three Ragtime Ephemeralist (TRE) digests of ragtime material as I research and read for enjoyment.
When I wrote him recently with a list of interview questions, he wrote that he was in the midst of a project but would get back to me as soon as it was finished, and indeed he did get back to me. His written answers to my questions follow.
Larry Melton: What is your musical background?
Chris Ware: Like many Midwestern youths of my general age and demographic, I took classical piano lessons but stopped sometime around age 13 or 14 when I realized it wasn’t going to help me meet girls. In the spirit of this pursuit, I later turned what shreds of what I’d learned on piano towards synthesizer and "prog rock,” but that proved even less effective towards my aim, not surprisingly. In between—appropriately, I guess—I got interested in ragtime.
If you play, do you perform?
Only for my cats. They almost always leave the room.
How did you discover ragtime?
Again, I was the perfect age to be soaked in the waterfalls of ragtime that cascaded from radios and record players in the early ’70s due to Joshua Rifkin’s recordings and, of course, the soundtrack to The Sting. When I look back on
