Joshua Rifkin

Born on 22 April 1944 in New York, New York, USA, Rifkin has worked as a pianist, musicologist, arranger and conductor who helped restore attention to Scott Joplin, the major ragtime composer. Throughout the 1960s he attended the Juilliard School of Music, New York University, Gottingen University and Princeton, and studied composition with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen in Darmstadt. At that time he also performed ragtime and piano jazz, appearing on Elektra Records with the Even Dozen Jug Band. For the same label he directed The Baroque Beatles, which offered classical-style treatments of songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He further arranged and conducted Wildflowers plus additional sessions for Judy Collins. In 1970 Rifkin became Professor of Music at Brandeis University in Massachusetts while serving as musical director of Nonesuch Records, an Elektra subsidiary. The following year he appeared as a featured artist in the Lincoln Centre’s well-received production An Evening With Scott Joplin. From 1970 to 1974 he issued three successive volumes of Piano Rags By Scott Joplin that received Record Of The Year awards from Stereo Review and Billboard; the releases coincided with the 1973 film The Sting, whose soundtrack included ‘The Entertainer’ and other Joplin pieces arranged by Marvin Hamlisch, another Juilliard alumnus. The movie captured seven Academy Awards, and together with Rifkin’s albums and Gunther Schuller’s New England Conservatory Jazz Repertory Orchestra And Ragtime Ensemble it triggered a nationwide revival of Joplin’s music. Thereafter Rifkin concentrated on the classical sphere, leading concerts and issuing several albums, while also advancing the digital restoration of historic ragtime recordings.