RISM’s copy of “The Cascades” was arranged by Etilmon J. Listening to the piece, you can almost hear the water splashing as the cascades flow down-or you might hear structural and harmonic similarities to Joplin’s earlier success, the “Maple Leaf Rag.” Joplin probably visited the fair when it opened, and the “Cascades” rag could often be heard there. Festival Hall was the fair’s main venue for music performances and housed the world’s largest pipe organ at the time. Fourteen waterfalls flowed into a basin in front of the fair’s centerpiece, Festival Hall, with the Colonnade of States surrounding it. The “cascades” of Joplin’s title were part of “the most beautiful feature of the Exhibition,” as a souvenir photo book from the fair phrased it. Exhibits from fifty foreign countries and almost all of the states ensured that fairgoers had a good time. The fair, which attracted an estimated 20 million people from around the world, encouraged visitors to look back to the nation’s frontier days while looking ahead to progress in the fields of technology, science, and medicine. This World’s Fair was known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and celebrated the centennial of the historic event that doubled the size of the United States and launched an age of exploration and Western expansion. The original piano rag, which was once advertised by Joplin’s publisher as being “as high-class as Chopin,” was composed upon the occasion of the World’s Fair in St. The Joplin piece in RISM is an orchestral arrangement of “The Cascades” (RISM ID no. When you think of Scott Joplin (1867 or 1868-1917), a piano rag probably comes to mind rather than a piece for piano plus strings, winds, and percussion-but the latter is precisely the instrumentation of the only work in the RISM database by Joplin, who died 100 years ago on April 1.
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