Someone sits at a piano playing ragtime, wistfully remembering. It’s midwinter.
Nostalgia is comforting companion. A fragment of music can cause a cascade of memories, like the waft of a forgotten perfume rushing you with reminiscences of the grandmother you hadn’t thought of in decades.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 little masterpiece The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a man is born old and grows younger. The 2008 movie inspired by it has young (old) Benjamin being patiently taught a Scott Joplin waltz called Bethena by an elderly co-resident in an old-folks home.
Thinking about nostalgia and about Bethena makes me think of a little-known photograph of Joplin’s piano. It shows two manuscript pages on it just legible enough for the music to be made out. This scrap of music is not known to exist anywhere else, so it has no proper beginning or end. I’ve loved this beautiful fragment for years and have wanted to somehow give it life by making it performable. I’ve now added my own music that seamlessly leads up to and away from it. In my small way I’ve done my part to rescue it. Some memories just may need rescuing.
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This is beautiful.i love nostaglia.