Program #86, January 10 2002: 20th-century theatre pieces series, part XIII: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha.

We got an early start on Black History Month by listening to Joplin's labor of love: a theater piece designed to embody a cluster of socially uplifting messages for the benefit of the Afro-American people; show how elements from ragtime and even more traditional African-American musicalia could be successfully fused with aspects of light operetta and mainstream opera; and (whether Joplin realized this or not) projectively deal with various aspects of his own childhood (or is setting your opera in roughly the time and place of your childhood just an accident?). But his labor was in his lifetime unrequited, for Treemonisha -- despite having first been published in a scaled-down form in 1911 -- was only premièred thirty years ago this month, and even then was not produced in its full form until 1975. The story of how Treemonisha came to be encodes in microcosm the larger tragedy of Joplin, who was both born at the right time, and born at the wrong time; making clear how that was so was the narrative center of this week's program.

Raised in Texarkana by parents who had access to enough resources to allow his musical talents to begin to blossom early, Joplin was born to synthesize his talented family's African-American musical heritage together with the popular-American (read: white) and European-classic influences he picked up through childhood private music lessons and participation in area musical life. While still in his teens, he took up the life of a traveling musician -- and this put him in a perfect position to participate in a great cultural convergence, the first-ever wholesale entry of African-American cultural forms into white American popular culture through ragtime.

Joplin did not invent ragtime, nor was he the first to popularize it. Ragtime as a popular form grew up out of the collision of several musical influences -- the previous popularity of brass bands (and the marches that were their mainstay) formed the backbeat and macrostructure of ragtime works, while African-American elements of melodic dissolution/reconstitution through syncopation ("ragging") were layered over the marches' oompah to form an essentially African-American, polyrhythmic "translation" of white music. The cultural synthesis of something-white-that's-black/something-black-that's-white was irresistible then as now, and accentuating that synthesis' allure was the fact that the major cultural fountainhead for ragtime was the occasional music of saloons, brothels, and other seamy sites in the growing American demimonde, especially up and down the Mississippi River Valley; here, with ragtime, was perhaps the first situation in which the allure of art forms that are just a little naughtier than their consumers (and the dubious racial politics that always seems to get mapped onto that allure) became entrenched in American mass popular culture in a recognizably modern form. But various social factors also sealed the deal for ragtime: the U.S.A. was experiencing a period of prosperity, so there was a growing middle class with enough money to spend on pianos and ever more sheet music, enough leisure time to spend on making hours of piano playing be the center of social occasions and get-togethers (in these pre-television, pre-film, pre-radio, pre-automobile days), and the first beginnings of an American youth culture learning to define itself against previous generations through differences in artistic consumption.

So ragtime was burgeoning as Joplin arrived on its performance scene, embodying in his own musical training the mix of African-American and white musical elements that gave it rise. His training had already led him to composition, and he completed various songs and other works in a relatively classical vein during the mid-1890s; thus, since he was now playing ragtime up and down the center of the country, it was natural for him to set himself the goal of rising to ragtime's peak by composing new rags, and he succeeded, beginning with authorship of the wildly popular Maple Leaf Rag in 1899. Joplin milked the basic ragtime form for all it was worth, and experienced enough financial success to focus on composition as his main activity. However, he very quickly grew dissatisfied with merely cranking out rag after rag (brilliant as they were) to feed the public's demand for new sheet music. Joplin now sought to transcend the synthesis of ragtime, and turn his art into a more general synthesis, a more evolved musical language out of which could be crafted musical works that would stand alongside those of Europeans and white Americans. Much like a Bartók, he wanted to remain grounded in his synthesis of influences while pushing it to new levels of individual and musical expression; but, additionally, he sought to use these new levels as vehicles for the uplifting of the African-American people through art and education. His opera Treemonisha, for which he also wrote the libretto, became his primary avenue for accomplishing this task. Unfortunately, Joplin met with a great number of obstacles in making his opera breathe life: while the American musical world was happy (at least from a business standpoint) with a black composer of "mere" rags, it could not countenance a black composer of serious art music, much less serious art music centered on African-American themes and content. Joplin's time, effort, and money dwindled in ever-more futile efforts to mount a production of Treemonisha, and he was not to see a bona fide production before his premature death from syphilis in 1917.

The plot of Treemonisha revolves around the abduction of its titular character, a young woman who protests against a group of male "conjurers" who prey on the fears and superstitions of her community by selling them such items as "bags of luck". Her origins, abduction, and rescue partake of a dreamy, legend-like quality similar to that of many discovery-myths (complete with an interlude featuring dancing bears!), indicating Joplin was drawing on deeply held archetypes in order to craft his tale. The most interesting part of the plot comes with Treemonisha's objection to her rescuers' desire to punish her abductors; she instead urges lenience, forgiveness, and reintegration of the miscreants into the community, which then seeks to elevate her to a position of leadership among them -- a rather forward-looking social position for its time, and one also no doubt entangled with Joplin's own complicated dealings with women, though that's perhaps another story for another time.

Even though Treemonisha may seem a bit musically dated to us now, and its message of uplift through education and good faith has been tempered by the crosscurrents of African-American experience during the 20th century, it is still breathtaking to see how much ground Joplin was able to cover as composer and auteur, essentially on his own. One wonders what he might ultimately have wrought, had Treemonisha seen the light of day in his lifetime, and had his life been long enough to allow him to try to top Treemonisha with even greater work. His career thus remains of great interest, value, and inspiration to us today.

We began with a piece by jazz historian and musical polymath Gunther Schuller, who re-orchestrated Treemonisha for the 1975 production. Joplin's published orchestration was scaled down for financial reasons, as he assumed it might be easier to mount productions if not so many musicians were required; but Schuller and others wanted to perform Treemonisha as Joplin would have wanted it to be orchestrated, so they engaged in a reconstructive extrapolation of what that probably would have been. I thought it might be kind of cool for us to see what other sorts of things Schuller had done, to get a sense of his breadth, and I wanted to inject a little taste of avant-garde content into this otherwise non-avant-garde program -- so I played that non-jazz-/non-ragtime-related piece to get us going. Then a small poetry reading and appropriate banjo piece, then Joplin from there on out.