Born in the late 1860s in Texarkana, on the border between Texas and Arkansas, Scott Joplin took up the piano as a child and eventually became a travelling musician as a teen. He immersed himself in the emerging musical form known as ragtime and became the genre’s foremost composer with tunes like "The Entertainer," "Solace" and "The Maple Leaf Rag," which is the biggest-selling ragtime song in history. Joplin also penned the operas Guest of Honor and Treemonisha. He died in New York City on April 1, 1917.
Scott Joplin (1867/1868 – April 1, 1917) was an African-American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the "King of Ragtime Writers". During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.
"Scott Joplin." Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2015. Web. 30 Mar. 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMAtL7n_-rc The story of the piano begins in Padua, Italy in 1709, in the shop of a harpsichord maker named Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori (1655-1731). Many other stringed and keyboard instruments preceded the piano and led to the development of the instrument as we know it today.
Cristofori's piano was developed from the harpsichord and consequently rather small and made entirely out of wood. As time passed, however, the development of larger instruments with more and heavier strings at higher tensions - all in order to increase the volume of sound - necessitated a more rigid construction. The wooden frame was successively reinforced with more and more pieces of iron, and in 1825 the complete cast iron plate was introduced by the American piano maker Babcock. The iron plate could withstand the increased string tension, and prevented the instrument from gradually changing shape as the wooden instruments did. Also, it now became possible to keep the tuning stable over longer periods of time.
Mankind’s knowledge that a taut, vibrating string can produce sound goes back to prehistoric times. In the ancient world, strings were attached and stretched over bows, gourds, and boxes to amplify the sound; they were fastened by ties, pegs and pins; and they were plucked, bowed or struck to produce sounds.
A steel string is suspended under high tension between two supports (the agraffe or capo d'astro bar and the hitch pin) fastened in the metal frame (the plate). Close to the hitch pin end, the string runs across a wooden bar, the bridge, which is glued to a large and thin wooden plate, the soundboard. The level of the bridge is slightly higher than the string terminations, thus causing a downbearing force on the bridge and the soundboard. The soundboard is reinforced by a number of ribs glued to the underside, one reason being to make the soundboard withstand the downbearing force. The string is struck by a felt hammer, which gains its motion from the key via a complicated system of levers, the action.