At 5:15 pm on April 5, my partner asked, “are you going to that ragtime band tonight?” The concert had slipped my mind; I had no intention of going anywhere. My head flooded with reasons to stay home, but my better angels won, and I found myself sitting with our publisher Andy Senior and shaking hands with several local subscribers as the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra began “A Pageant of American Music” at the Rome (NY) Capitol Theatre. The house, to my surprise, was mostly full.
On the way there, Andy explained the uniqueness of the event. An acoustic, unamplified twelve-piece concert orchestra of the 1890s to 1920s playing vintage instruments in a restored theater of the type that could have hosted them in 1905. As a bonus, they were accompanied by David Peckham on the theatre’s Möller organ. The organ was installed when the theater was built in 1928 and restored in 2023 along with the rest of the building.
The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, now in its 39th year, is the world’s only year-round professional ensemble dedicated to recreating the syncopated sounds of early musical theatre, silent cinema, and vintage dance. Rick Benjamin formed the orchestra after discovering thousands of historic orchestral scores from the Victor archives while at Juilliard. He is a leading expert on silent film accompaniment, making the Capitol Theatre an especially appropriate venue. In August,
