The Augustan Club Waltzes

Scott Joplin, Arranged by Nigel Hall

Instrumentation: Brass Band

Length: 4 Minutes

Difficulty: D Grade

The Augustan Club Waltzes were published in 1901 although, like many of Joplin's works, they may have been written earlier.

In their book "Rags and Ragtime: A Musical History" (New York, 1978) the authors describe Joplin's music as follows:

"He combined the traditions of Afro-American folk music with nineteenth-century European romanticism; he collected the black Midwestern Folk rag ideas as raw material for the creation of original strains. Thus, his rags are the most heavily pentatonic, with liberal use of blue notes and other outstanding features that characterize black folk music. In this creative synthesis, . . . the traditional march became the dominant form, and the result was a new art form, the Classic rag – a unique conception which paradoxically both forged the way for early serious ragtime composition, and, at the same time, developed along insular lines, away from most other ragtime playing and composing."

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