Intermediate
Elaine
2:32
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Browse piano sheets by Etilmon Justus Stark on Zen Virtual Piano. Etilmon Justus Stark worked on “Fifteen Standard High Class Rags” (1912), popularly known as “The Red Back Book,” a folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble with seven pieces by Scott Joplin and four by James Scott. He did not orchestrate all of them, but he managed most or all of the Joplin pieces, and the folio was one of the first orchestral folios of ragtime and certainly the first to feature Joplin rags. Its arrangements later caught the ear of the film director George Roy Hill, so that the orchestrations were adapted by Marvin Hamlisch for the 1973 film The Sting, among them Stark’s original conception of Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” little changed more than six decades after it was first introduced. A folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble that was later adapted for a film suggests arrangements sturdy enough to be reworked by another hand. While his brother William Paris joined their father in the business eventually named John Stark & Son, Etilmon went a different direction: he had already been studying violin and wanted a career in music, which he pursued first as a band music major and then as an instructor. In 1905 he found work as a musical instructor and with orchestras, and also worked for his father, arranging works from the Stark firm’s output for piano and ensemble. A band music major turned instructor who also worked with orchestras suggests a musician at home in more than one kind of ensemble. His own works include “Trombone Johnsen: Rag-time Cakewalk” (1902), “Brain-Storm Rag” and “Twilight: A Meditation” (both 1907), “Billiken Rag” (1913) and “Gum Shoe” (1917). “Brain-Storm Rag” had an eye-catching cover of a wild-haired pianist extracting all kinds of noise from an upright piano, with notes flying and falling over. RagPiano.com calls “Billiken Rag” perhaps his finest syncopation, with a mysterious classical feel, opening with a cascade of octaves and arpeggios in a minor key and resolving into a happier syncopated passage. A cover with notes flying off the piano and a rag that opens in a minor key and resolves into cheerful syncopation suggest a composer at home in both the comic and the shadowy ends of ragtime. In 1949 Stark was located in St. Louis by the researchers and authors Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, who were preparing the book They All Made Ragtime and drew family history from him and Carrie Bruggeman Stark. Being tracked down in 1949 by authors writing a ragtime history suggests that his name still mattered to those piecing together the music’s past.
Browse piano sheets by Etilmon Justus Stark on Zen Virtual Piano.
Etilmon Justus Stark worked on “Fifteen Standard High Class Rags” (1912), popularly known as “The Red Back Book,” a folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble with seven pieces by Scott Joplin and four by James Scott. He did not orchestrate all of them, but he managed most or all of the Joplin pieces, and the folio was one of the first orchestral folios of ragtime and certainly the first to feature Joplin rags. Its arrangements later caught the ear of the film director George Roy Hill, so that the orchestrations were adapted by Marvin Hamlisch for the 1973 film The Sting, among them Stark’s original conception of Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” little changed more than six decades after it was first introduced. A folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble that was later adapted for a film suggests arrangements sturdy enough to be reworked by another hand.
While his brother William Paris joined their father in the business eventually named John Stark & Son, Etilmon went a different direction: he had already been studying violin and wanted a career in music, which he pursued first as a band music major and then as an instructor. In 1905 he found work as a musical instructor and with orchestras, and also worked for his father, arranging works from the Stark firm’s output for piano and ensemble. A band music major turned instructor who also worked with orchestras suggests a musician at home in more than one kind of ensemble.
His own works include “Trombone Johnsen: Rag-time Cakewalk” (1902), “Brain-Storm Rag” and “Twilight: A Meditation” (both 1907), “Billiken Rag” (1913) and “Gum Shoe” (1917). “Brain-Storm Rag” had an eye-catching cover of a wild-haired pianist extracting all kinds of noise from an upright piano, with notes flying and falling over. RagPiano.com calls “Billiken Rag” perhaps his finest syncopation, with a mysterious classical feel, opening with a cascade of octaves and arpeggios in a minor key and resolving into a happier syncopated passage. A cover with notes flying off the piano and a rag that opens in a minor key and resolves into cheerful syncopation suggest a composer at home in both the comic and the shadowy ends of ragtime.
In 1949 Stark was located in St. Louis by the researchers and authors Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, who were preparing the book They All Made Ragtime and drew family history from him and Carrie Bruggeman Stark. Being tracked down in 1949 by authors writing a ragtime history suggests that his name still mattered to those piecing together the music’s past.
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The popular name of “Fifteen Standard High Class Rags” (1912), a folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble with seven pieces by Scott Joplin and four by James Scott; Etilmon Justus Stark managed most or all of the Joplin pieces.
Marvin Hamlisch adapted the orchestrations for the 1973 film The Sting, including Stark’s original conception of Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”
RagPiano.com calls “Billiken Rag” perhaps his finest syncopation, with a mysterious classical feel, opening with a cascade of octaves and arpeggios in a minor key and resolving into a happier syncopated passage.