Presentation: King Without a Country - Scott Joplin, The King of Ragtime

Author Nicole V. Gagné discusses one of America’s greatest composers: Scott Joplin, son of a former slave, from his meteoric rise and his tragic eclipse to his triumphant revival as the genius of ragtime.

Nicole Viviane Gagné  is the co-author (with Tracy Caras) of Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1982) and the author of Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music (de Falco Books, 1990), Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1993) and Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music (Rowman & Littlefield, Second Edition, 2019). A contributor to The New Grove II, she has written about music for BMI Music World, Op, Option, and newmusicbox.org; she has also lectured on music at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Pittsburgh, and the California Institute of the Arts. Her essay “The Beaten Path,” a history of percussion in American music, won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 2004. She is the librettist and co-composer (with David Avidor) of the opera Agamemnon (1993), in which she also performed as a singer and instrumentalist; in 2019 she made a series of videos for the entire opera. She wrote and hosted the SFCR radio show “A 21st-Century Guide to 20th-Century Music” from 2012 to 2018. 

Nicole Viviane Gagné - Website