July 2 House Concert: Joplin, Brahms, Strauss Jr., Shepherd

Dear Friends,
To me, every year as the weather warms, Ragtime sounds extra good! So on Sunday July 2 at 3 pm, please join us here at the house for a concert featuring favorite Rags by Scott Joplin: The Sycamore, Wall St. Rag, Elite Syncopations, Solace, The Entertainer, Pineapple Rag, Maple Leaf Rag, Magnetic Rag–and of course his amazing Concert Waltz, Bethena. I’ll also play and discuss Adaline Shepherd’s remarkable 1909 Live Wires Rag–she lived in Milwaukee!  Also on the program, Johann Strauss Jr.’s Kaiser Waltz, and a work by Strauss’s friend Johannes Brahms–amazing that they knew each other well!.

For the lecture portion of the program, I’ll talk about Scott Joplin’s fascinating life-story, from his birth in Texarkana just three years after the Civil War, to his young touring years with various ensembles, to his periods of relative settling down and hard compositional work in Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri–where he developed his style of notating rags–to his big break in meeting publisher John Stark and how the Maple Leaf Rag took the music world by storm, to his subsequent successful years in New York City, and to his eventual decline there including the commercial failure of his opera Treemonisha. He died in New York in 1917 at the age of 48. We’ll also talk about the great Joplin revival that started in the 1970s and which we are still enjoying to this day.

To sign up for the concert, please email: trevor@trevorstephenson.com Reservations required. Attendance is $45 per person. Refreshments served. The concert will be filmed and posted on youtube on July 3. All those attending the concert will receive the private link. If you’d like to register just to receive the link, but cannot attend the concert, cost is $25 per household. Would be great to see you July 2!
Trevor and Rose Stephenson