Joshua Rifkin, whose recordings of Scott Joplin’s compositions on the Nonesuch label are considered paragons, is reputed to have helped spark the Ragtime Revival of the 1970s. Yet he had never appeared in Joplin’s stomping grounds in Sedalia, Missouri. That changed on Friday May 30, 2025, when Rifkin performed a number of Joplin’s pieces, beginning with the most famous, bantering, “How can I be here and not play the ‘Maple Leaf Rag?’” at a packed Liberty Theater in downtown Sedalia. The “intimate lecture-recital” was part of the 51st annual Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival.
Between measured, crystalline performances on a grand piano Rifkin reflected on Joplin’s artistry, particularly to Joplin’s groundbreaking use of European classical music conventions through a uniquely African American perspective. By calling “The Crysanthemum” an “Afro American Inter Mezzo,” Rifkin called to example, “Joplin is saying but I can lay claim to this tradition as well as to that to which I came, through birth, and at the same time he’s saying, but I can change this tradition, I can bring this new element into it and thus go beyond limitations with which Joplin would have to live all of his life.”
Similarly, by calling “Bethena” A Concert Waltz, Joplin was expanding what the public should associate with a Black composer, beyond music for dancing, and therefore from brothels and barrooms in favor of the concert hall. “Bethena” is a piece Joplin wrote in 1905 shortly after the death of his newlywed Freddie. It is a rangy piece at once contemplative, forceful, sorrowful, and triumphant, chosen by the festival as this year’s official theme, and of which Rifkin provided a precise and resounding rendition.
After delivering “Eugenia,” Rifkin returned to the keyboard to highlight a single note that made Joplin stand above his contemporary composers by allowing “mystery and darkness” conflict an otherwise sprightly melody. These nuances are what makes Joplin stand the test of time, and perhaps evoke musically the particular challenges of Black artists in the first generation after the abolition of slavery in the United States. In “Gladiolus Rag” Joplin used “Maple Leaf Rag” as template, but Rifkin debunked any notion that Joplin was simply reusing old ideas, and instead used the elegance of the piece to show how much the composer had evolved artistically in only seven years. In that time he had moved from Sedalia to St. Louis to New York City, where, driven wary by failed attempts to produce his opera Treemonisha, he would lay groundwork for the explosive impact of Black Broadway during the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that Joplin did not live to see as such.
Rifkin closed out his musical performances with “Lily Queen,” by Arthur Marshall and Scott Joplin, performed from an early manuscript owned by Chris Ware, publisher of the Ragtime Ephemeralist.
Pointing out that Joplin’s role in the piece has remained unclear, Rifkin said that the complicated history of the piece will be written about by Edward Berlin in an upcoming edition of the Ware’s publication. He left listeners to appreciate many differences in chord changes and transitions, the most striking coming in the last strain.
In the second half of the event, festival director Bryan Wright and fellow performer William McNally guided a conversation with Rifkin that allowed the audience to understand the musical milieu in which he was raised and how he came to make a series of recordings that became the standard for Joplin enthusiasts. McNally began listing Rifkin’s musical achievements: from 1961 to 1964 he was a student at the Darmstadt School in Germany, known for its avant-garde music composition program; in 1963 he was a vocalist, pianist, and kazoo player on a jug band recording; in 1962 he sang the counter tenor line in a cantata by PDQ Bach, the fictional character created by Peter Schikele; he graduated from the Julliard School in 1964; further studied in Germany and at Princeton; and in 1965 arranged and recorded an album of Beatles tunes in the Baroque style; “and then he turned twenty-six and made a Joplin recording.”
In responding to how ragtime entered his life, Rifkin revealed the rich musical ecosystem in which he grew up in New York City. Long before he studied avant-garde classical composition, he was exposed to ragtime and early jazz at age ten by his older brother who played cornet and enlisted him as a piano accompaniment. “So, in fact, I started playing traditional jazz, listening a lot…I absorbed everything Jelly Roll Morton at that time,” Rifkin recalled. “My brother and I had the good fortune to be taken by our father to jazz clubs in New York City—imagine these two little kids sort of wandering into these clubs—but we could hear and get to know some of the old jazz musicians from New Orleans and Chicago and they even let me sit in with them at times.” Later, the family came to know formidable songwriter and music publisher Clarence Williams and would visit him at his pawn shop monthly. By way of the mid-century jazz scene in New York, Rifkin came to Joplin, learning to play “Maple Leaf Rag” by ear and performing it in a jazz style.
Later, Joplin’s music took on a luminance it hadn’t had before—as written. Upon receipt of an Outstanding Achievement Award at the beginning of the concert, Rifkin dedicated the concert to his friend (and prior Scott Joplin Festival performer), Bill Bolcom, saying “Bill played a great role in my coming to Joplin…I think it’s even fair to say that there would not have been my recordings of Joplin without Bill.” Later in the conversation he described that he had first heard “The Entertainer” as a 1948 recording by Bunk Johnson’s band out of New Orleans when he was an adolescent. But it was hearing Bolcom’s interpretation of the seminal tune at fellow composer and friend Eric Salzberg’s apartment that created an effect that was “absolutely magical,” and to which he still claims to aspire today.
When Rifkin proposed recording Scott Joplin: Piano Rags on Nonesuch, a classical label under parent Elektra, they agreed. In the summer of 1970, Rifkin sat down at a Baldwin SD-10 at the Rutgers Memorial Church in New York’s Upper West Side to record, dodging the schedule of subway cars that roared intermittently below, eight Joplin compositions that would help revive popular reverence for the composer.
By early 1971 music critic Harold Schonberg, inspired by the album, would write a piece that peeled back the curtain on the fervent subculture behind ragtime and urged, “Scholars, Get Busy on Scott Joplin!” By September 1974, Rifkin’s first Joplin album would hit number 5 on Billboards’ Best-selling Classical Music chart. Meanwhile, Marvin Hamlish’s recording of “The Entertainer,” for The Sting hit number 3 on the Billboard 200. Joplin, and therefore ragtime, had reach unequivocal popular listenership again.
Why did Rifkin’s album swell to popularity whereas other pianists’ recordings, such as those by Knocky Parker and Ann Charters, did not? Rifkin explained that a conscious effort to deliver the album through Nonesuch, a label with a wide and ready audience, as a classical album, presented as “serious music, with a serious cover, and serious liner notes” played a role. He also reflected on a “cultural moment” leading up to the Bicentennial of the United States of America in which the public wanted to rediscover and connect to homegrown culture. This included a growing interest among white audiences in Black culture. As an archetypal music form that predated jazz, swing, rock ’n’ roll, funk, and more, ragtime contained a familiarity that was new, yet accessible.
During an audience Q&A, a question about the reception of Rifkin’s recordings among African Americans, however, prompted the speaker to admit that, though ragtime is music that only Black musicians could have created, reception among Black audiences was low and “…something that befuddled us, that we regret immensely.” He expressed hopes that Black representation in ragtime circles will increase, pointing to the successful band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2025, the audience at the Scott Joplin Festival remained overwhelmingly white.
A specific cultural phenomenon apparent in Rifkin’s recounting of the revival of Scott Joplin’s music is the composer’s induction into the classical music canon, perhaps driven most decisively by Rifkin’s choice to record Joplin in the first place. “In a sense, the message was all on the page, so I basically approached it as I would any music, whether it be Bach…or Brahms, or Stravinsky,” noting later in response to another member of the audience that other performers would interpret Joplin’s music differently, perhaps closer to how he himself did as a youngster.
In the discussion’s closing, Joplin’s status in the classical world only became more solidified as Rifkin relayed that he would be editing Joplin manuscripts for Germany-based G. Henle, one of the most prestigious classical music publishers in the world. When that time comes, hopefully in two to three years, Rifkin remarked wistfully, he’d like to bring them to Sedalia to perform Joplin once again. “Imagine Scott Joplin’s name on these covers alongside Brahms, or Chopin, or Mozart. One couldn’t wish for anything more,” Rifkin said before receiving a long line of admirers on the stage.
Christian Frommelt is a swing dancer and musician from St. Louis, Missouri. For nine years he served as co-organizer of the renowned Nevermore Jazz Ball & St. Louis Swing Dance Festival and continues to organize the Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl in the effort of collective expression. He has played piano for the Gaslight Squares jazz band since 2019.
