Intermediate
Nightingale Rag
3:35
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Browse piano sheets by Joseph Francis Lamb on Zen Virtual Piano. Joseph Francis Lamb is lauded by the Library of Congress’s music blog as one of the “big three” ragtime composers, along with his friend Scott Joplin and the Kansas City native James Scott, yet with the exception of a brief stint as an arranger and song plugger in New York’s Tin Pan Alley his career lay outside the music industry. For Lamb, composing was recreational. That Joplin and Scott, his fellow names among the big three, also appear as the styles his heavy rags combine suggests a composer in close conversation with his peers. Lamb was born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1887, the fourth and youngest child of the Irish immigrants James and Julia Lamb. He acquired woodworking skills from his carpenter father and an affinity for music from his mother, a former choir member. His first sources of music instruction were his sisters Katherine and Anastasia, who had formal piano lessons, and instead of doing homework he would spend hours with them at the family’s parlor piano or perusing The Etude, a journal for musicians to which they subscribed. It featured works such as Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Nightingale’s Song,” which influenced Lamb’s 1915 “Ragtime Nightingale,” also titled “Nightingale Rag.” A rag influenced by a piece in a magazine for musicians suggests ragtime and parlor music sharing a bookshelf. A boy who learned from his sisters’ lessons and their magazine suggests an education assembled from what was within reach at home. He learned the syncopated rhythms of ragtime by studying sheet music bought from local publishers. He continued composing in his leisure time and approached the Harry H. Sparks Music Publishing Company in Toronto, which ultimately issued more than 20 of his works, among them “Celestine Waltzes,” dedicated to his sister Anastasia. Lamb was invited to play a couple of his compositions at Joplin’s home, and Joplin was so impressed that he persuaded John Stark to publish them. The Stark Company issued twelve of his songs in twelve years, including “Sensation,” which the firm had previously rejected. A firm that rejected one piece and then published twelve works by the same composer shows how much a single recommendation could change. Being asked to play at Joplin’s home and winning his support suggests that a composer outside the industry could still be heard by a musician he admired. His “heavy” rags combine Joplin’s melody-dominated style with Scott’s expansive use of the keyboard registers, among them “Ethiopia Rag” and “Excelsior Rag” (both 1909), “American Beauty Rag” (1913), “Nightingale Rag” (1915) and “Top Liner Rag” (1916). He used sequence for development and surpassed ragtime’s usual four-measure phrase structure. About 1920, as popular interest shifted from ragtime to jazz, he stopped publishing his music and played and composed only as a hobby.
Browse piano sheets by Joseph Francis Lamb on Zen Virtual Piano.
Joseph Francis Lamb is lauded by the Library of Congress’s music blog as one of the “big three” ragtime composers, along with his friend Scott Joplin and the Kansas City native James Scott, yet with the exception of a brief stint as an arranger and song plugger in New York’s Tin Pan Alley his career lay outside the music industry. For Lamb, composing was recreational. That Joplin and Scott, his fellow names among the big three, also appear as the styles his heavy rags combine suggests a composer in close conversation with his peers.
Lamb was born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1887, the fourth and youngest child of the Irish immigrants James and Julia Lamb. He acquired woodworking skills from his carpenter father and an affinity for music from his mother, a former choir member. His first sources of music instruction were his sisters Katherine and Anastasia, who had formal piano lessons, and instead of doing homework he would spend hours with them at the family’s parlor piano or perusing The Etude, a journal for musicians to which they subscribed. It featured works such as Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Nightingale’s Song,” which influenced Lamb’s 1915 “Ragtime Nightingale,” also titled “Nightingale Rag.” A rag influenced by a piece in a magazine for musicians suggests ragtime and parlor music sharing a bookshelf. A boy who learned from his sisters’ lessons and their magazine suggests an education assembled from what was within reach at home. He learned the syncopated rhythms of ragtime by studying sheet music bought from local publishers.
He continued composing in his leisure time and approached the Harry H. Sparks Music Publishing Company in Toronto, which ultimately issued more than 20 of his works, among them “Celestine Waltzes,” dedicated to his sister Anastasia. Lamb was invited to play a couple of his compositions at Joplin’s home, and Joplin was so impressed that he persuaded John Stark to publish them. The Stark Company issued twelve of his songs in twelve years, including “Sensation,” which the firm had previously rejected. A firm that rejected one piece and then published twelve works by the same composer shows how much a single recommendation could change. Being asked to play at Joplin’s home and winning his support suggests that a composer outside the industry could still be heard by a musician he admired.
His “heavy” rags combine Joplin’s melody-dominated style with Scott’s expansive use of the keyboard registers, among them “Ethiopia Rag” and “Excelsior Rag” (both 1909), “American Beauty Rag” (1913), “Nightingale Rag” (1915) and “Top Liner Rag” (1916). He used sequence for development and surpassed ragtime’s usual four-measure phrase structure. About 1920, as popular interest shifted from ragtime to jazz, he stopped publishing his music and played and composed only as a hobby.
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Common questions
Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph F. Lamb.
His first instruction came from his sisters Katherine and Anastasia, who had formal piano lessons; he studied their copies of The Etude and learned ragtime’s syncopation from sheet music bought from local publishers.
He was invited to play some of his compositions at Joplin’s home, and Joplin was so impressed that he persuaded John Stark to publish them.