Program Note

Heliotrope Boquet (1907) is unique amongst Scott Joplin's (1868-1917) works, as it is a collaboration with Louis Chauvin. According to “Perfessor” Bill Edwards, “this rag contains the only known surviving compositional fragment of Louis Chauvin, who by most contemporary accounts was a very creative, skilled and prolific pianist who knew a multitude of pieces, though he was unschooled and could neither read nor write music.”

Edwards continues, “Chauvin lived a hard life as an itinerant pianist and died of complications from syphilis and multiple sclerosis shortly after his 24th birthday. The first two sections of Heliotrope Bouquet are Chauvin's, which Joplin first heard while visiting Arthur Marshall in Chicago in 1906, and thought enough of them to put them down to paper. The harmonization and last two themes were later completed by Joplin, with some tie-ins to the first two. The A section, utilizing a tango rhythm, is fairly unique in all of ragtime for its structure, rhythm and melody. The B section also contains some unexpected syncopation. The C and D sections are obviously born of Joplin's writing in their nature, but the C section does contain a snippet of Chauvin's melody in the middle. I have also heard this piece interpreted on occasion as a tango throughout, much like Solace.”

James Reel, in an article about Hagen for Fanfare Magazine, quotes him: “I studied piano with a Polish immigrant and Holocaust survivor named Adam Klecewski when I was about seven,” he says, “… I stopped studying with him because I used to pay my brother to tell my mother I'd practiced, even if I hadn't been, and my brother got too expensive. I started again when I was 14, because I had seen the movie The Sting and was fascinated with the Scott Joplin music they used all the way through it. That inspired me to teach myself to read music — which I had forgotten how to do — , and I asked for piano lessons again.”

In homage to Louis Chauvin and to Scott Joplin, Hagen overlays the theme of his original orchestral composition Heliotrope over the final strain of their composition in this arrangement. First conducted by Hagen with the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, it is dedicated to Morris Goldman (manager, at the time, of the orchestra) and premiered in concert before Hagen's own Heliotrope by the Denver Chamber Orchestra conducted by Music Director JoAnn Falletta at the Paramount Theater in Denver, Colorado on 14 November 1991.