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home in St. Louis for almost a decade, but he traveled widely during these years. His visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a massive fair that attracted some of the finest musicians of the day, may have been especially influential. Although ragtime music had not yet been published, it was apparently widely played at the Exposition, albeit most often at the outskirts of the fairgrounds, where black musicians performed—while the choicer, more centrally located venues were reserved for white entertainers. At some point in the mid-1890s, Joplin settled down in Sedalia, where he eventually undertook formal study of harmony and composition at the nearby George R. Smith College.
    Around 1897, Joplin wrote the “Maple Leaf Rag,” a composition that was destined to become the most famous ragtime piece of its day. It wasn’t until two years later that John Stark published the work, and over the next twelve months only four hundred copies were sold. But in the fall of 1900, the “Maple Leaf Rag” caught on with the general public, and became the first piece of sheet music to sell more than one million copies—a figure all the more stunning when one realizes that there were fewer than 100,000 professional musicians and music teachers in the United States at the time. Amateur pianists, for their part, must have found it anything but easy to navigate the technical and rhythmic difficulties of Joplin’s celebrated rag; however, many no doubt purchased the sheet music and labored over its intricate syncopations.
    With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the “Maple Leaf Rag” only hinted at the full extent of Joplin’s talent. It lacks the melodic subtlety, compositional ingenuity, and emotional depth that would eventually separate Joplin from other rag composers. But in rhythmic intensity the “Maple Leaf Rag” stands out even today. Put simply, it is the most intoxicatingly syncopated of any of Joplin’s rags. If the essence of ragtime’s popularity was, as Irving Berlin later suggested, its ability to capture the “speed and snap” of modern American life, then no piece of music evoked this emerging sensibility better than the “Maple Leaf Rag.”
    Later Joplin pieces revealed the wide range of compositional techniques that this ambitious African American composer had mastered: the parlor waltz refinement of “Bethena” (1905), the coy interludes that temper the syncopations of “The Ragtime Dance” (1906), the boogie-woogie-inflected third section of “Pine Apple Rag” (1908), the languid habanera rhythms of “Solace” (1909), the almost self-parodying syncopations of “Stoptime Rag” (1910), the moving minor key sections of “Magnetic Rag” (1914). With the Brahmsian darkness of “Scott Joplin’s New Rag” (1912) and, especially, his “Magnetic Rag,” the last piece he completed, Joplin had pushed his compositions far beyond the boisterous beer hall ambiance that characterized, for many listeners and players, the rag idiom. This was music on a large scale that was now being squeezed into the narrow confines of rag form—so much so that the songs seemed almost consciously designed to defy the commercial expections that Joplin’s earlier successes had engendered.
    These genre-breaking excursions into other styles were defining qualities of Joplin’s music. Accounts that stress his role in uplifting and refining the rag idiom mostly miss the point. True, Joplin set high goals for himself, but his relationship to ragtime was more one of fighting against its constraints and stylistic dead ends rather than battling for its honor and glory. “Joplin’s ambition is to shine in other spheres,” a 1903 newspaper article about him recounts. “He affirms that it is only a pastime for him to compose syncopated music and he longs for more arduous works.” 26 Joplin was also ambivalent, at times even hostile, toward the pyrotechnics of most rag pianists, which emphasized speed