“Solace”
Composed by Scott Joplin; conducted and adapted by Marvin Hamlisch.
This music was recorded in Los Angeles in 1973 as a part of the production of the Universal feature film The Sting.
Marvin Hamlisch, piano, with an ensemble that includes two b-flat clarinets, one bass clarinet, one muted trumpet and one violin.
The story – music and commerce – part 1 – Scott Joplin:
One of the recurring and sadly ironic themes in the history of western music, definitely including the music of the United States of America, is that much music of great worth is composed, played, perhaps only briefly, and then it falls into the oblivion of neglect. The obverse of this is that music of little worth is composed, played, promoted by massive engines of commerce, is heard by millions, and is ubiquitous and continually popular.
Many people have asked me: “why was there a swing era”? Although the reasons for that are numerous, the bottom-line answer is that various business forces including the emergence in the 1920s of commercial radio and recordings, and after 1930 Hollywood feature films, as mass media, combined to provide economic opportunities for business people to promote dance music and jazz, thus creating a substantial demand for music in the swing idiom. Supply, in the form of a stream of new copyrighted songs, bands to play them, and soloists and arrangers to exalt them, followed demand. Business considerations, that is, making money, were the mainspring that drove the making of music during the swing era. Myriad musicians, many quite talented, profited while they produced a good bit of music of remarkably high quality. The magic combination of those phenomena lasted from the mid-1930s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, by which time the flood had diminished to a trickle. Once again, there were many reasons for this, and they were mainly business reasons.
From the standpoint of musicians throughout the last few centuries, there has been and continues to be the ever-present tension between making music, which is a fundamental need of all musicians, and making a living, which is also a fundamental need. Balancing these needs has always been a challenge. Any musician who finds success in his or her profession has to first figure out how to balance these needs in a way that works for them. In the United States in the period from approximately 1930 to 1970, the commercial marketplace for music offered musicians abundant opportunities to work in a wide variety of situations. Consequently, a good many musicians were able to make music, and make a living doing it. But yet again, new and unfriendly economic forces conspired against musicians starting in the 1970s, and the result was a gradual diminishment of opportunities for them to work.
The American composer Scott Joplin lived, worked and died before the swing era, and indeed before the widespread development of the commercial forces described above. Most of his work as a composer was largely unknown to Americans during his lifetime. For decades after his death, his work and name were little more than footnotes in the history of American music. However, as a result of a few serendipitous developments around 1970, several of his ragtime compositions for piano gained a measure of public recognition and commercial success on a scale that would have been far beyond Joplin’s wildest fantasies. As a result, Scott Joplin’s name and work are now widely known, his music is studied in conservatories, and is presented in many different performance settings. It is a part of the fabric of American music.
If we look at the musical career of Scott Joplin, we must recognize these facts: first, he was black in a rigidly segregated society when he was working as a musician; second, for much of his career, he did not have the benefit of effective copyright protection for his musical compositions. Finally, Joplin’s aspirations as an African-American composer in Jim Crow America, despite his talent and the high quality of his music, were never really successfully promoted and managed during his lifetime.(1) Joplin, as a working, professional musician, had to deal with these factors on a daily basis. Although he had some successes, he also had many failures. His successes include the musical compositions he created that have been saved from oblivion by various means. (Unfortunately, there are many more of his musical compositions that for various reasons were lost.) His failures, which were centered around his inability to make enough money from his work, and get his work before audiences, stemmed from his inability to find and successfully exploit a business model which would have allowed him to make a living, and to promote his music – specifically his two operas, A Guest of Honor and Treemonisha, in a way that would have allowed them to be accepted by at least the part of the American public in the early Twentieth Century that liked opera.
NOTE: An excellent biographical sketch of Scott Joplin is the one written by Edward A. Berlin, author of the book King of Ragtime …Scott Joplin and His Era. (A link to that biographical sketch can be found at endnote 2.) In addition, there is a worthwhile summary of Joplin’s life and career in music at the Wikipedia post on him, a link to which can be found at endnote 3.)
For the purposes of this post, I will include some basic information about Scott Joplin. He was born on November 24, 1868 in Texarkana, Texas; and died on April 1, 1917, New York City. Joplin grew up in a musical family in Texarkana. From age 11 to 16, he received a substantial musical education from Julius Weiss, a German-born teacher who somehow found his way to Texarkana in the late 1870s. Weiss quickly noticed extraordinary musical talent in the 11-year-old Scott Joplin, whose mother Florence also encouraged and assisted him to learn music. While tutoring Joplin, Weiss introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera, specifically Wagnerian opera. Weiss helped Joplin appreciate music as an “art as well as an entertainment” and helped Joplin’s mother acquire a used piano. According to Joplin’s widow Lottie, Joplin never forgot Weiss. In his later years, after achieving some commercial success as a composer, Joplin sent his former teacher “gifts of money when he was old and ill” until Weiss died.
During the late 1880s, Joplin traveled and worked in the American South as a musician. He performed (on cornet with a band) various ragtime (and other) compositions at the World’s Fair of 1893 in Chicago. (Actually, this ensemble played outside of the midway.) Exposure of the vast number of people who attended the Fair to this music was among the factors that combined to make ragtime something of a national craze by 1897.
In 1894, Joplin moved his base of operations to Sedalia, Missouri, but continued to work as a traveling musician. He worked as a solo pianist, leader of a small band (on cornet), and with a quartet of singers. “Joplin’s first rag publication was Original Rags, issued in 1899 by Carl Hoffman, a Kansas City firm. The cover says the music was arranged by Charles N. Daniels, and the music was copyrighted and advertised as being Daniels’s composition. Stung by that experience, Joplin would become more careful in his dealings with publishers.” (2)
“Later that year, Joplin met John Stark, a music dealer and small publisher in Sedalia. He arranged to have Stark publish “The Maple Leaf Rag,” and had a lawyer draw up a royalty contract. The unprecedented success of this piece brought Joplin (a measure of) fame, and the royalties, though not overly substantial, that eased the financial side of his life.” (2) Consequently, Joplin was able to stop touring as a performer. He bought a home in St. Louis, and devoted his time to composing.
Scott Joplin’s home in St. Louis at 2658 Delmar Blvd. as it appears today. Joplin resided there from 1900 to 1903, and also took in boarders to augment his income.
Joplin moved to St. Louis in 1900, and soon after composed several piano works, including “The Entertainer.” In 1901, he married his first wife, Belle Jones. Soon they had a child together, but regrettably the child died in 1903, and shortly thereafter, Belle died. There has been speculation by Joplin’s biographer, Edward Berlin, that these sorrowful occurrences, and a slowly progressing diminution in Joplin’s dexterity as a pianist, may have been caused in part by the effects of syphilis that Joplin may have contracted during his many years as an itinerant musician. Some time in 1903, Joplin left St. Louis and moved to Arkansas.
In June 1904, he married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, the young woman to whom he had dedicated his composition “The Chrysanthemum.” She died on September 10, 1904, of complications resulting from a cold (likely pneumonia), only ten weeks after their wedding. “Bethena,” Joplin’s first work copyrighted after Freddie’s death, was described by a biographer as “an enchantingly beautiful piece that is among the greatest of ragtime waltzes.” (The beautiful young woman pictured on the sheet music of Joplin’s “Bethena” may be his second wife, Freddie Alexander.)
During this time, Joplin ambitiously created a company of 30 performers and produced his first opera, A Guest of Honor, for a tour. It is not certain how many performances were staged, or whether this was an all-black or racially mixed production. During the tour, either in Springfield, Illinois or Pittsburgh, Kansas, someone associated with Joplin’s company stole the box office receipts. Consequently, Joplin could not meet the company’s payroll or pay for their lodging at a theatrical boarding house. It is believed that the musical score and libretto for A Guest of Honor were seized because of non-payment of the boarding house bill. In any event, everything Joplin had created for A Guest of Honor was lost after that.(2A) Nevertheless, Joplin continued to follow his dream as a composer of opera.
During much of the time from 1904 to 1911, Joplin composed another opera, Treemonisha. He moved to New York City in 1907: “…in an effort to find a backer and publisher for Treemonisha. He tried several new publishers, settling for awhile with Seminary Music, which published such favorite works of his as “Pine Apple Rag” and “Solace.” In 1908, the owners of Seminary established another publishing firm, Ted Snyder Music, where a young Irving Berlin was hired as staff lyricist and occasional composer. Joplin claimed in 1911 that he brought the score of Treemonisha to Berlin in an attempt to have it published. Berlin turned it down, but several months later published his own fabuously successful song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” in which the verse resembles music in the “A Real Slow Drag” section of Treemonisha. Two months later, Joplin published Treemonisha at his own expense, after first altering the ‘stolen’ theme of “A Real Slow Drag.” (2)
Treemonisha proved to be Scott Joplin’s undoing. From 1911 to shortly before his death on April 1, 1917, most of his energies were devoted to various attempts to get a performance of this opera. In 1915, as a last-ditch effort to see it performed, he invited a small audience to hear it at a rehearsal hall in Harlem. Poorly staged and with only Joplin on piano as accompaniment, it was “a miserable failure” to a public not ready for “crude” black musical forms—so different from the European grand opera of that time. The audience, including potential backers, was indifferent and walked out. William B. Scott writes that “after that disastrous single performance…Joplin suffered a breakdown. He was bankrupt, discouraged, and worn out.” He concludes that few American artists of his generation faced such obstacles: “Treemonisha went unnoticed and unreviewed, largely because Joplin had abandoned commercial music in favor of art music, a field closed to African Americans.”(2B and 3)
During this time he also composed other music (rags, songs, and longer works), but few were published. (His unpublished manuscripts were noted in court records as late as 1961, but have since disappeared.)
By 1917, as a result of the worsening symptoms of tertiary syphilis, Joplin’s health deteriorated quickly. He was hospitalized in January 1917, transferred to a mental institution, and died there April 1. His death marks the end of the ragtime era.(4)
The story – music and commerce – Joplin/ragtime revival – part 2:
Most people think the ragtime revival/vogue of the 1970s was a result of the massive popular success of the 1973 feature film The Sting, which included a good amount of Scott Joplin’s music. The enormity of the success of that film certainly supercharged a small but significant ragtime revival that had begun shortly before the film was made. But two separate recordings, made before The Sting by two separate musicians, had quite unexpectedly piqued the curiosity of a small but significant audience that proved to be receptive to what at that time was rather esoteric music, ragtime.
The first of these recordings was made by pianist Joshua Rifkin in late 1970. Before the Rifkin recording, “performers like Max Morath and scholars like Rudi Blesh and Vera Brodsky Lawrence were part of a tiny fraternity that kept the classic ragtime faith. But its current (in 1974) popularity began with an unpretentious album of Joplin piano scores that Joshua Rifkin recorded for Nonesuch Records in the fall of 1970, about the time he left the New York music scene to work as a professor at Brandeis University. As a graduate student at N.Y.U. and Princeton, Rifkin had had a successful apprenticeship with Nonesuch and its parent company Electra, during which he transformed Beatles tunes into quasi‐baroque music, orchestrated Judy Collins LP’s and conducted recordings of various music spanning four centuries.”
“The Nonesuch LP, Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, surprised a lot of listeners. Rifkin took the original sheet music straight, devoid of honky‐tonk flash and jazz mannerisms. He gave special attention to Joplin’s surprinted injunction (“Notice: Do not play this piece fast. Ragtime is never to be played fast.”), and produced something that was unquestionably syncopated but in a legato, fluid, graceful (even classical) fashion, worlds removed from the (then) prevailing conceptions of ragtime. Rifkin’s recording received little air play, yet it gradually became a world‐of‐mouth sensation. It was a record that could be played over and over, virtually indefinitely, without losing its warming, joyful (and occasionally bittersweet) appeal.”
“’The result was really totally unexpected,’ Rifkin recalls. ‘The record sold very strongly; by the end of year it had gone over a hundred thousand copies, which for a classical record company is an incredible number. By then it had been for some time on top of the Billboard classical charts. Because the demand was so persistent, I had to go back and make a second one.’ For small, innovative Nonesuch, a pioneer in budget‐priced records, these two albums were (and are) a gold mine.”(5)
The second recording that was important to the early 1970s ragtime revival was made by Gunther Schuller, who at that time was teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music.
“We make tapes of every concert we do, and the word got around. Angel said they’d like to make a recording in New York – they wanted me to get my best jazz friends for it, but I said, ‘Nothing doing. You liked what you heard on that tape—either I do it with my kids here or I’m not going to do it.’ So up they came and we made the recording in early 1973 at the Conservatory.” That album, The Red Back Book, achieved a double success; it displaced Dennis Brain’s Mozart horn concertos as Angel’s all‐time best seller, and earlier this year won a Grammy award as “the best chamber music recording of 1973.” Some of Schuller’s edited arrangements (of Joplin’s music)—microscopically credited, but paid for—later turned up in the Oscar‐winning soundtrack that Marvin Hamlisch orchestrated for The Sting. The film’s director, George Roy Hill, had approached both Schuller and Rifkin separately to score the film, but each declined the opportunity.”(6)
The story – music and commerce – part 3 – the film The Sting:
“Solace,” composed by Scott Joplin in 1909, was obviously not written to be used in a feature film. But as a result of the combination of the events discussed above, it along with other of Joplin’s music, happened to be in the right place at the right time before the right people. The feature film The Sting was released and distributed by Universal Pictures on December 25, 1973. Almost immediately, it racked up massive box-office numbers. The combination of talents the film’s producers and director had decided on proved to be magical.
Here is how the music from the film was advertised on the dust jacket of the soundtrack recording LP: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1973). Composed by Scott Joplin, Adapted & Conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. Featuring Marvin Hamlisch at the Piano. The enormous success of the film mandated that a soundtrack LP be produced as soon as possible. The original soundtrack recordings for The Sting were released as an LP by MCA Records in early 1974. The album spent several weeks at number one on Billboard’s Top LPs and Tape chart. That LP was produced by Marvin Hamlisch, but the executive producer was Gil Rodin, the former business head of the Bob Crosby band of the 1930s and early 1940s. It is unclear what Rodin’s job was at Universal’s record company, MCA/Universal. But his role in this project suggests that he was in charge of shepherding Universal soundtrack albums from the soundtrack on the film to a produced and distributed long-playing record. (Above right: swing era musician/businessman Gil Rodin – still creating musical successes in 1973.)
The music:
“Solace” is a habanera/tango composed in 1909 by Scott Joplin. Though Joplin labeled the piece “a Mexican Serenade,” its origins are more probably Cuban. It is considered to have a habanera and tango rhythm in three of its four strains, something unique for a work by Joplin, although a brief habanera bass did appear in his previous composition of that year, “Wall Street Rag.”
Although tango music is usually in 4/4 meter, with two downbeats (1 and 3) being strong, and two upbeats (2 and 4) being weak, Joplin wrote “Solace” in 2/4 meter, and his music is marked “very slow march time.” “Solace” is usually played andante, at around ♪112. The first two strains are in the key of C major, while the third and fourth are in F major.(7)
According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, “Solace” is a soothing and contemplative piece. It has a beautiful and melancholic melody that evokes a sense of peacefulness and remembrance. The gentle, airy sound of the piano …has a calming effect and a longing for comfort in times of sorrow and distress. Its slow and delicate nature …is ideal for relaxing and reflecting.”
I have selected the version of “Solace” used in The Sting in which the solo piano is accompanied by a small ensemble. Their presence at various places in this performance adds a bit of instrumental color to enhance the sound of the piano. I am not certain who arranged the music for the ensemble. It could have been either Marvin Hamlisch or Gunther Schuller. Whoever did it accomplished the feat with great subtlety: the aureoles of instrumental sonority that surround the piano rise and fall gently, but with great musical effect.
The recording presented with this post was digitally remastered by Mike Zirpolo.
Notes and links:
(1) The U.S. Copyright Law of 1909 basically created a property right in musical compositions that the composers of those compositions could own and license for monetary compensation (royalties). Shortly after that law was enacted, various composers, authors and publishers of music, led by Victor Herbert and others, organized the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), to legally enforce their copyrights, and to collect royalties when the copyrighted music of their members was used for commercial purposes.
(2) Here is a link to the biographical sketch of Scott Joplin written by Edward A. Berlin: http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/joplin.php
(2A) Regarding Joplin’s opera A Guest of Honor: “It was while in St. Louis that Joplin met with conductor Alfred Ernst, possibly through an introduction by his publisher’s daughter Eleanor. We know little of what transpired between Ernst and Joplin, but by the end of 1901 or early in 1902 Joplin began work on his first opera, A Guest of Honor. The story commemorates an incident that both enraged and thrilled significant parts of America: President Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner invitation, in October 1901, to black leader Booker T. Washington.
Joplin filed an application with the Copyright Office in February 1903 to copyright A Guest of Honor, but did not send the score (with the application), as he was anticipating its publication by John Stark. He formed a company and rehearsed the opera the following summer, and began a tour in late August. Theater bookings were made for September and October in towns in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, but most were not filled. Someone associated with Joplin’s company stole the box office receipts early in September, and the company disbanded. The music was never published, and the score was lost, supposedly destroyed when Joplin could not pay the boarding house bill for his troupe.” (Extracted from the summary of Scott Joplin’s life by Edward A. Berlin http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/joplin.php
(2B) See: Scott, William B.; Rutkoff, Peter M. (2001). New York Modern: The Arts and the City. Johns Hopkins University Press.
(3) Here is a link to the Wikipedia post on Scott Joplin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Joplin
(4) Much of the information in this post on Scott Joplin’s life and career was extracted from the Wikipedia post on him. See also: https://apoloybaco.com/jazz/scott-joplin/
(5) The Ragtime Revival – A Belated Ode to Composer Scott Joplin, New York Times, August 11, 1974 by Scott Kroninger, 97.
(6) Ibid.
(7) The brief summary of “Solace” as music comes from the Wikipedia post on it.
(8) Habanera (“music or dance of Havana”) is the popular name for “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (French for “Love is a rebellious bird”), an aria from Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera comique Carmen. It is the entrance aria of the title character, a mezzo-soprano role, in scene 5 of the first act.
Here is a link to an article about Scott Joplin, and some lovely piano performances of his music by Lara Downes, one of the most brilliant pianists of today: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/arts/music/lara-downes-scott-joplin-piano.html
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