Title: King of Rags
Author Name: Eric
Bronson
Author Bio: Eric Bronson teaches
philosophy in the Humanities Department at York University in
Toronto. He is the editor of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and
Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Poker and Philosophy (Open Court,
2006), Baseball and Philosophy (Open Court, 2004), and co-editor
of The Hobbit and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and The
Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (Open Court, 2003). In 2007 he
served as the "Soul Trainer" for the CBC radio morning
show, "Sounds Like Canada." His current project is a book
called The Dice Shooters, based loosely on his experiences
dealing craps in Las Vegas.
Author Links - The link for any or all
of the following...
Guest Post
When I was a kid, the first ballet I
ever saw was Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." It was too long,
too serious, too dark, and much too much dancing. I wanted to go
home.
When I finally did go home, I saw
things. Dancing things. Maybe not toy soldiers or sugar plum
fairies, but boring, mundane things in my room definitely appeared to
me to be dancing.
It seems to me that's a good a reason
as any to give children an education in music. I'm not the first
person to write that, obviously. Over two thousand years ago,
Socrates also advocated teaching young Greeks music early on in their
education. In Plato's Republic, Socrates says that "musical
training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm
and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on
which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of
him who is rightly educated graceful..."
Music can make graceful our bodies and
our souls. One hundred years ago, the king of all ragtime composers,
Scott Joplin wrote an opera about an African American child who saves
her village from ignorance and superstition. It's a beautiful
ragtime opera for children and adults. The child, Treemonisha,
learns to
"Never
treat your neighbors wrong,
By
causing them to grieve,
Help
the weak if you are strong,
And
never again deceive."
And, in the end, she teaches us that
"Ignorance
is criminal
In
this enlightened day.
So
let us all get busy,
When
once we have found the way."
There
are lots more important lessons in Joplin's ragtime opera. Perhaps
the most important lesson for black history month is that if white
adults had the opportunity to listen to more black musicians one
hundred years ago, black children might have a bigger voice today.
Tchaikovsky's
opera is played every Christmas. Joplin's opera was never published.
And that's too bad because children can learn an awful lot when they
listen to diverse voices.
We all can.
Book Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Neverland
Publishing
Release Date: May, 2013
Buy Link(s): Amazon
Book Description:
King of Rags
follows the life of Scott Joplin and his fellow ragtime musicians as
they frantically transform the seedy and segregated underbelly of
comedians, conmen and prostitutes who called America’s most vibrant
cities home. Inspired by Booker T. Washington and the Dahomeyan
defeat in West Africa, Joplin was ignored by the masses for writing
the music of Civil Rights fifty years before America was ready to
listen.
Excerpt One:
Whenever he had a
difficult decision to make, Scott set himself up on the small hill
with high grass and wildflowers. In the starlight he was especially
careful not to disturb the patient, purple flowers. A traveling white
schoolteacher once read to his class the story of the heliotrope from
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
Derided by the world and scorned by her lover the Sun God, a poor
nymph keeps her eyes ever fixed to the sun. Streaked with purple, she
is covered in leaves and flowers, roots that claw their way around
her helplessness, forever binding her to the earth.
“‘An excess of
passion begets an excess of grief,’” the schoolteacher quoted.
“Don’t reach so high. You’ll be much happier if you lower your
sights.”
But there was
something about the nymph’s undying faith that touched him inside.
She refused to be stuck here in this world, and that refusal brought
hope along with the pain. Scott thought he understood the nymph’s
eternal conflict. His music wouldn’t right the wrong, but it might
help ease the loss. Long after the sun abandoned her, Scott sat among
the heliotrope and played for her his coronet.
The hill had a
further advantage: it overlooked the new train station. He was there
one December day, ten years earlier, when the first Texas &
Pacific railway pulled in from Dallas, on its way to Fulton,
Arkansas. Since then his father had taught him to play the violin,
banjo and coronet, but none of them could take him beyond his
colorless world. Maybe the trains couldn’t either, but the tracks
held that promise, going outwards, ever away. His mother believed the
coronet was
the Devil’s
instrument. Scott disagreed. Any instrument that brought relief to
others was useful. It shouldn’t much matter who was dancing at the
other end.
Under the wavering
light of a half-moon, Scott played with all the sounds of the night:
the high-pitched melody of cicada bugs over the running bass line of
lumber cars and freight trains, garbage crates and short hauls
sounding their syncopated iron rhythms: boom-chugga
boom-boom: boomchugga boom-boom.
The music of the night trains was the sound of waiting—waiting and
waning and wasting away. The greatest secrets in life, Scott knew,
lay not in the music or the
people who played
it, but in the short, silent spaces that sometimes fell unexpectedly
off the beat. The Stop Man taught him that without hardly even saying
a word.