Contact: Robbie Ward
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Internationally recognized ragtime performers will call Mississippi State home for a few days later this month during what organizers expect to become an annual event for enthusiasts of America's first style of music.
To be held March 23-25, the Templeton Ragtime Festival will bring some of the world's best ragtime performers for a series of events celebrating the historic musical genre. The public event will include a blend of major and mini concerts, as well as seminars and question-and-answer sessions led by the artists.
Tours of the Charles H. Templeton Music Museum in Mitchell Memorial Library also are scheduled.
Well-known musicologist David A. Jasen of New York City, author of a new encyclopedia on ragtime and dozens of earlier books on the subject, is serving as a festival consultant. A longtime friend of the late Charles H. Templeton Sr. of Starkville, the festival and museum's namesake, Jasen appraised the collection in 1986.
Jasen, also a professor of communication arts at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, said he worked to assemble at MSU "the best ragtime festival in the United States." The Templeton Collection, which includes some 22,000 pieces of sheet music and 192 items dating to the late 1800s, helped shape his vision for the celebrations, he added.
While ragtime may have reached its peak in the early 1900s, enthusiasts throughout the world still have it in their hearts, observed Jasen, who has appreciated ragtime since his youth.
"It can be very exciting and get your toes a-tapping," he said. "It really wasn't singable and it really wasn't danceable, but it was background music to have a good time."
According to Jasen, ragtime is most easily defined as a piano composition of three or four sections, each containing 16 measures that combine a syncopated melody accompanied by an even, steady rhythm.
Other Jasen observations about ragtime:
--During its heyday, it was the most exciting and popular music in America;
--"The Maple Leaf Rag," the first piece of sheet music to sell more than a million copies, established ragtime as a legitimate musical genre; and
--While genteel, middle-class Southerners and Midwesterners often played the music in their homes, residents in other parts of the country associated the music with bars and brothels--where it actually originated.
Scheduled festival performers and speakers will include:
--Jeff Barnhart, a pianist, vocalist and composer who leads two bands in the United Kingdom;
--Mimi Blais, a Canadian often described as the "New Queen of Ragtime," (though classically trained at the Quebec Conservatory of Music and Montreal's McGill University);
--Neville Dickie, a popular British jazz pianist;
--Tracy Doyle, an authority on the life and times of composer and Tin Pan Alley pioneer Egbert Van Alstyne;
--Sue Keller, recognized among the top women ragtime pianists;
--David Reffkin, founder and co-director of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival, contributing editor and reviewer of The Mississippi Rag and producer and host of "The Ragtime Machine," a weekly ragtime music program on San Francisco's KUSF-FM;
--Virginia Tichenor, pianist and vice president of the West Coast Ragtime Society; and
--Richard Zimmerman, a producer, performer and director of numerous ragtime concerts.
In addition to mini-concerts paired with seminars, the festival also will feature formal shows each day.
Charles "Chip" Templeton Jr. of Starkville said the festival will help bring widespread attention to the Templeton Museum, which, according to the wishes of his father, is subtitled "The Business of Music." The Templeton Ragtime Festival is sponsored by the MSU Libraries and the Charles H. Templeton Sr. Music Museum.
An accomplished musician in his own right, the younger Templeton said the museum items that his father collected over the years help illustrate U.S. history through music. The depth and breadth of the collection typically requires patrons to visit more than once to appreciate its contents, he added.
"Dad taught me music was something you experienced," Chip Templeton said. "This festival will give people the opportunity to dig underneath the iceberg and see what is there."
For specific information or to register, telephone 662-325-2559 or visit ragtimefestival@library.msstate.edu or http://library.msstate.edu/ragtime/festival/index.html.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.