Scott Joplin Treemonisha: A Real Slow Drag

Posted on February 27, 2013 by admin

Published on Jan 28, 2013

Soprano Marti Newland, baritone George Spitzer and pianist Artis Wodehouse, members of MELODEON perform “A Real Slow Drag” from Scott Joplin’s opera, Treemonisha. This is one of several video selections taken from their live performance of “Treemonisha Suite” given by MELODEON on 1/6/13 at Church of the Epiphany, NYC. “A Real Slow Drag” is the grand finale to the opera. Here, the African-American community, previously held in thrall to superstitious conjurors finally cast off the pernicious influence of these folks, and unite instead behind the heroine, Treemonisha, who espouses education, tolerance and gracious forgivenness.

MELODEON is a chamber group founded by Artis Wodehouse for the performance of 19th and early 20th century American music. Wodehouse chose and arranged 14 numbers from Joplin’s 1911 opera, Treemonisha for concert performance by soprano, baritone and keyboard.

Videographer and sound recordist is Whitney Slaten.

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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
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