UCM Intern Attends Her First Ever Scott Joplin Music Festival

By Katherine Hamilton
UCM Intern for Townsquare Media

The Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival was held in downtown Sedalia from May 27th through the 30th.

This summer, I am interning at Townsquare Media in Sedalia. I have been helping write and record news segments for KSIS. This has given me a variety of new opportunities to experience, one of which was attending my first Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in order to write a short article about the event and my experience.

I attended the festival on Thursday, May 28th. The first event of my day was the Welcoming Ceremony in the pavilion at 9 a.m. The audience got to hear from a variety of individuals involved in the setup and support of the festival, including Sedalia’s mayor, Traves Williams, the event’s current artistic director Bryan Wright, and the incoming artistic director Ethan Leinwand. Organizers spoke a bit about the history and importance of the event. Everyone seemed incredibly grateful for this opportunity to perform music that is often not showcased as much as modern music or classical pieces.

During the welcoming ceremony, the audience was introduced to 2026 Ragtime Kid winner, 16-year-old Illinois resident, Anderson Pries. The Ragtime Kid program is dedicated to finding youth interested in ragtime music and connecting them with the festival. Pries spoke about wanting to start a ragtime festival closer to his home near Chicago. After this, Pries performed a number on the provided piano. Following Pries’ number, Wright and Leinward performed a piano duet and then welcomed the first artists of the day.

The first pair to perform in the pavilion after the opening ceremony were Dr. Dave Majchrzak and David Reffkin. Majchrzak played piano while Reffkin joined him on violin. This was an extremely talented pair of performers. I was not extremely familiar with ragtime music outside of clips in movies and other media and was thoroughly impressed by the use of the violin. Both Majchrzak and Reffkin are highly skilled musicians and work wonderfully together. The pair created beautiful yet chipper music together. I was thoroughly entertained throughout the 30-minute set by this pair.

After I headed to the Stark Tent set up near the Fox Theater. Here, I heard Christina Austin performing a set of piano rags all with titles relating to food. This was a clever idea and Austin performed each piece beautifully. Each piece relating to food made the set charming and memorable.

I was able to talk briefly with both Majchrzak and Austin about their experiences and connection to the festival. I asked them both about how they first got involved with ragtime.

“I've been playing rag time since I was 12, so I'm 65 now, so what is that? 53 years. How I got involved with it, I don't know,” Marjchrzak said “My mom and dad had a record, and it would happen to be Dick Hyman doing Willie the Rock Knox. It was, and I just liked the music and started playing it and never looked back.”

Austin explained her story as well.

“So we had a book of Scott Joplin Rags, just on our music shelf, that was kind of snuck in there. Both my parents kind of dabbled in piano, but none of them were, like, super good, and I just found that book one day and then just started playing the regs and didn't know anything about ragtime or that he had other compositions or that there were other composers until much, much later. But I was just very happy to play like a dozen Scott Joplin rags for, like, 20 years. And then finally discovered the whole ragtime community after that.”

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Knowing why these two got involved with ragtime itself pushed me to ask what brought them to the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival specifically.

Marjchrzak said that he is from St. Louis Missouri, but had never heard of the event until a celebrated ragtime piano player and friend of his, Trevor Tiser, told him about the event and that he should go to Sedalia for the festival.

Austin said that she was invited by the festival’s organizers. Austin is a freelance pianist who uploads videos of her playing ragtime pieces onto her YouTube channel, Christina Pepper Piano. Organizers found her channel and reached out to ask if she would perform at the festival in Sedalia.

My next question was what they have enjoyed most about being in the ragtime community. This pair agreed that their favorite part of being in the ragtime community has been meeting others interested in the same music as there are.

“Meeting the people. The other players. Yeah. And talking to them, and I've learned, you know, it's. It's always fun. Well, you know, if you meet you go to a place where there's other people that like what you like, it's, I mean, there are times we'll be at the festival. We'll spend hours just talking about piano stuff, which to a non-pianist is very boring and very nerdy and I’ll admit that it's nerdy,” Majchrzak said “The music is good, but the friendships are better.”

“Just finding that there are other people who like this, because no one in my family cares at all about it. You know, I have no family or friends that introduced it to me or anything like that. It was just like a solo activity of mine that I would just do by myself for a long time, until I started putting videos up on YouTube and then now there's like, oh, there's all these people who are like this cool thing,” Austin said.

All in all, I would consider my first Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival a success. While not having much prior knowledge of the event or ragtime music itself, I thoroughly enjoyed my day and will be likely to make an appearance again for next year’s festival. There is so much to love about this community.