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The KPAC Blog features classical music news, reviews, and analysis from South Texas and around the world.

Marches Madness: High-Stepping To Scott Joplin

It's Marches Madness! Throughout this month, we're posting some of our favorite marches — from the concert hall, opera stage and parade ground. Got one we should hear? Played any yourself? Let us know in the comments section.

From the "Maple Leaf Rag" to " Solace," Scott Joplin wrote some of the jauntiest and most haunting music of the years before World War I. While he's the undisputed king of ragtime, he didn't realize his long-held dream of conquering the opera stage.

He wrote his first opera, A Guest of Honor, about Booker T. Washington dining at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. The score is lost.

Treemonisha,about a young African-American woman helping her community overcome superstition and lack of education, has fared better, though well after Joplin's death. Multiple productions since the score's rediscovery in 1970 — such as the Houston Grand Opera one excerpted above — have brought its gentle charms to audiences around the world.

In the finale, after a short introduction, the chorus is "marching onward, marching onward," led by Carmen Balthrop as the title character, "marching to that lovely tune."

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Corrected: March 19, 2013 at 11:00 PM CDT
A previous version of this story identified Frederick Douglass as the White House dinner guest.
Mark Mobley