New England Ragtime Ensemble


The New England Ragtime Ensemble was a Boston chamber orchestra dedicated to the music of Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.

History

Conservatory president Gunther Schuller created the 12-member student ensemble in 1972 for a festival of romantic American music, at which the group performed some of Schuller's own editions of orchestrated versions of Joplin's piano rags. These period arrangements from the collection "Standard High-Class Rags", commonly known in early accounts as the Red Backed Book, had been preserved by New Orleans musician Bill Russell and forwarded to Schuller by pianist and music historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence.
In 1973 the group's performance at the Smithsonian Institution led to a recording for Angel Records. Orchestrations for later repertoire included oboe, bassoon, French horn and guitar and banjo, a routine period practice.
"The Red Back Book" earned a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of 1973. It spent 54 weeks on Billboard's Top 100 Albums List; 84 weeks on the Top Classical Albums List, including 6 separate appearances at #1; and 12 weeks on the Top Jazz Album List. It was the magazine's Top Classical Album of 1974.
The ensemble's second recording, "More Scott Joplin Rags", spent 26 weeks on the Top Classical list, earning a #7 ranking for 5 weeks.
Beginning in 1973 the ensemble began a tour of major American and Canadian venues, including sold-out performances at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, where they would play seven more times; Tanglewood; the Blossom Music Center and the Ravinia Festival; the Newport Music Festival; the Saratoga Performing Arts Center as well as headlining the inaugural Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri.
Following a series of performances in The Netherlands, in September 1974 they performed at a state dinner at the White House for President and Mrs. Gerald Ford.
The group continued to concertize extensively after 1974, becoming independent of the conservatory when Schuller left the school in 1977. He expanded their repertoire, adapting existing arrangements as well as arranging and transcribing the music of James Scott, Joseph Lamb, Louis Chauvin, Arthur Marshall, James Reese Europe, Jelly Roll Morton, Zez Confrey and Claude Debussy. Schuller later incorporated contemporary rags by William Albright, Stefan Kozinski, Kenneth Laufer, Rob Carriker, David Reffkin and one of his own compositions, Sandpoint Rag.
Subsequent travel took the ensemble to 38 states and included performances at Symphony Hall, Boston; Alice Tully Hall;Carnegie Hall; the National Academy of Sciences ; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the Ambassador Auditorium; Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; and Stanford University, Temple University and UCLA.
They appeared on WGBH-TV and WNAC in Boston; WETA-TV in Washington DC; WTIC-TV in Hartford; KENW, Portales, New Mexico; and performed live on NBC Today and A Prairie Home Companion.
During these years tours took them to Canada, Italy, Norway, Portugal and the former Soviet Union.
Their final performance on July 16, 1998, brought them back to the stage on which they had debuted, Jordan Hall at The New England Conservatory.
On November 19, 2018, members of the original ensemble were joined by later players and students for the second annual Gunther Schuller Legacy Concert in Jordan Hall - a joint presentation of New England Conservatory and the Gunther Schuller Society.

Members

The original ensemble

As The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble