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Rick Benjamin is the founder and conductor of the world renowned Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, formed and dedicated to the exploration and preservation of American popular styles. Benjamin has an active career as a pianist and tuboist as well as an arranger.

Composition of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra


Because orchestras by their nature and tradition are much more fluid in regards to personnel, there are currently 36 players on the payroll of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and their appearance at a particular performance depends on a wide variety of criteria including the number of players called for by the score(s) to be performed. The score for the motion picture Zorro was written for 12 instruments while the orchestra's ragtime program is scored for 10 players. Some of the orchestra's programs of historic theater music call for 25-30 musicians and some of the grand silent film scores call for over 70 players, so the orchestra has to hire out when they perform these programs.

The Road Manager for the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is Leslie Cullen who also plays flute and piccolo and has been a member of the orchestra since 1989. Cullen studied at the Juilliard School and is an adjunct at Bucknell University. Cullen has appeared at the Ravinia Festival, The Kennedy Center, Chautauqua, and the Smithsonian Institute. Cullen is a native of Lawton, Oklahoma and was the former artist-in-residence for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma. Cullen has also played with the Royale Trio and the Linden Woodwind Quintet.

Early Interest in Ragtime Music
Benjamin's interest in ragtime music began in the 1970's when he was eight years old. Benjamin was visiting his grandparents and wandered out to the garage and discovered an old 1917 Victorola with ragtime music from the turn of the century. "As music poured out of the dusty ancient machine, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of complete wonder: A new world, glowing with life, was calling out to me from another time," Benjamin says. "The sounds were somehow much more meaningful to me than the current pop music of the Gerald Ford era. ...I knew in my bones that these performers and their composers were expressing their sheer joy in life through their music."

Benjamin says he learned that ragtime was the first authentic American music. "Until ragtime came along, all our pop music here was imported from Germany or England," Benjamin says. "Suddenly, with this new ragtime music -- from the Midwest, from Chicago and St. Louis -- was America's first homegrown music product."

Discovery of the Music of Arthur Pryor
Benjamin studied at Juilliard and intended to become a professional tuba player. While a student at Juilliard in 1985, Benjamin had a "dental accident" while he was having a tooth extracted by a dentist that shattered his teeth. As a result, Benjamin was unable to play the tuba after his jaw was wired up. "I couldn't play, couldn't open my mouth any wider than a straw," says Benjamin. Unable to play, Benjamin was assigned a research paper on Arthur Pryor, an 1890s conductor and music director. In his search Benjamin found that Pryor's personal collection of over 4,000 pieces was in an old theater in Asbury, New Jersey that was about to be torn down. Benjamin was given the collection free for hauling it off and it took Benjamin three days to cart everything off.

The collection included rare musical scores and manuscripts. "Even at the conclusion of this, I wasn't sure what I had," Benjamin said. Then he found signatures on compositions from Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy and Sousa. "I had pieces no one had ever heard of before." The collection contained thousands of works from the 1920's by composers including Scott Joplin, Edward MacDowell, W.C. Handy, Victor Herbert, and Jerome Kern. Benjamin found that Pryor had been first conductor for the Victor Talking Machine Co and as conductor, got to decide what was recorded to play on the new fangled Victrolas. "Anybody who was anybody in that era would send their scores to Mr. Pryor in hopes that they would be recorded," Benjamin said. The collection had been thought to have been destroyed in a fire.

Controversy over Initial Concert at Juilliard
In 1986 Benjamin decided to form a 14-piece orchestra of fellow Juilliard students to perform the music using authentic period arrangements of similar ensembles from the ragtime era. Benjamin made a request to Juilliard to perform a concert of turn-of-the-20th-century American composers but his request was rejected by Juilliard's dean. "Absolutely not, we do Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, not W.C. Handy," said Juilliard's Dean. Benjamin skirted Juilliard's rule against performing ragtime music under the guise of presenting a Mozart program on solo tuba at a concert hall. "I was a rebel, you see," says Benjamin and left the doors to the concert hall open to attract passerbys. Benjamin presented the inaugural performance to a packed house at Juilliard's Recital Hall. The program of their initial performance included the 1912 score of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues," selections by Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert, and a manuscript orchestration of Joplin's "Peacherine Two-Step." After the performance Juilliard professor Vincent Persichetti told Benjamin that he should make musical preservation of "America's original music" his life's work.

Benjamin was put on probation for producing a concert of ragtime over the dean's objections. However someone in the audience recorded Benjamin's first concert on a walkman and the recording came to the attention of Columbia Records executive Thomas Frost, who loved the music. Frost produced the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra's first recording. "Suddenly we went from nobodyhood to having this nine-time Grammywinning guy producing us," Benjamin said. Benjamin quit Juilliard and has been leading the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra ever since. "I became so engrossed developing my orchestra full time and curating the thousands of historic orchestrations I had found that one day I cleaned out my locker and left [Juilliard] without a word," says Benjamin.

Lincoln Center Debut
Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra made their New York debut at the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in March 1988. In their debut they performed twenty-one pieces composed between 1905 and 1920 and a medley of tunes from the 1890's. In their debut the orchestra performed in a variety of styles including "a concert waltz, a maxixe, one-steps, two-steps, foxtrots and blues, and, of course, numerous rags, some quite picturesque." Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times that their performance "came off not as a dry musicological dig, but as an evening of superannuated but abidingly energetic fun." The performance by Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra was the first of its kind at the Lincoln Center by a professional ragtime ensemble.

Oh, You Kid!
In February 1999, Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra premiered Oh, You Kid! at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Oh, You Kid! was a collaboration between the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Rick Benjamin's Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and was commissioned by the Kennedy Center and the American Dance Festival as part of the Doris Duke Millennium Awards for Modern Dance and Jazz Music. The commission pairs modern jazz companies with jazz composers and performers for works that feature live music. Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times that the show was "exuberant romp to ragtime music."

Treemonisha
In June 2003 Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra premiered their version of Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha at the Stern Grove Festival, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater located at 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard in San Francisco, and the oldest festival of its kind in the United States. Treemonisha had originally premiered in 1975 with full professional staging by the Houston Grand Opera. However Benjamin thought that the Houston staging was "too heavy, too Verdiesque" and spent five years reconstructing the opera score for a 12-piece theater pit orchestra of the kind Joplin and his peers wrote for and performed with. "We want to do it exactly as we think he would have done it in 1911 on tour, " said Benjamin. "The train would arrive at some town in Iowa, and the cast and chorus would take a buggy, or maybe walk, down to the theater with their simple properties - - maybe a couple of canvas backgrounds -- set it up and give this show with the local pit orchestra."

In October 2005 Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra premiered his version of Treemonisha on the East Coast at Wake Forest University with a 13-piece orchestra and a cast of 40. Benjamin said that Joplin never intended for the "opera" to depend on a large orchestra. "His real dream was to give everyday people the opportunity, perhaps their only one, to experience opera on their own terms in the music halls and neighborhood theaters." Benjamin says that Joplin "understood the power of the operatic medium to deliver a message. As a black man at the time, he probably wasn't allowed to go to the opera." Benjamin hopes his new orchestration will encourage musical groups to perform Treemonisha "with a small orchestra, of modest needs, and still convey this wonderful message. Joplin would be beaming from some place, because his work is being performed." "I see Treemonisha as "opera" in name only," writes Benjamin. "It is much more an amalgamation of the well-established American traditions of vaudeville, tab-show, melodrama, and minstrelsy, all held together by Joplin's marvelous music. For this, the ideal accompaniment should be provided by the regulation twelve-piece theatre orchestra of that era."

Silent Movie Performances
Benjamin has a collection of nearly a thousand period cinema-orchestra scores and Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra are well known for their recreation of playing original scores to silent films while the silent movies are simultaneously projected on screen. Silent movies for which they perform the score include Buster Keaton's Cops, Harold Lloyd's Never Weaken, and Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant. "It's like going to the movies with the extra benefit of live music," says Carol Woodruff, director of Cultural Outreach at East Carolina University. "This is a really cool show. The musicians get really pumped and put their whole lives into their performance," says Mary Ruth Helms. Benjamin says he is surprised by the response from younger listeners. "Surprisingly, our audience demographics seem to indicate the audience is younger, Generation X, and not the seasoned citizens, as they are known. It surprises us," says Benjamin. "I think a lot of younger people ... move away from some of the commercial stuff that's crammed down their throats."

Other Musical Activities
In addition to touring, Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra performs on radio programs for the New York Times' WQXR, National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Voice of America networks.

Benjamin has conducted the the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra (Denmark), the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Olympia Symphony in Washington State, the New Jersey Symphony, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Performing Arts Society, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria.

Benjamin has written articles on popular music that have appeared in several periodicals.

Benjamin performs lecture tours on late 19th and early 20th Century American music at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Benjamin is at work on two books: The American Theater Orchestra and Encyclopedia of Arrangers & Orchestrators: 1875-1925.

In addition to curating the collection of Arthur Prior, Benjamin also curates the collection of Simone Mantia, B.F. Alart, and Frank H. Wells theatre orchestra collections. Benjamin's collection totals about 10,000 fully-orchestrated selections from the 1890s – 1920s.

Awards and Honors
Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra were selected to be America's "Ambassador of Goodwill" at the World's Fair in Seville, Spain.

Personal Life
Benjamin was greatly encouraged in his musical career by his grandfather, J. Edward Smith, who played violin, clarinet & piano, among other instruments, throughout his life, and was a musician with the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra, in Monmouth County, NJ, for many years until his death. Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra continue to perform regularly in Monmouth County, NJ venues, where both grandfather and grandson lived.

Benjamin lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and lectures at Bucknell University.

Discography

 * You're A Grand Old Rag: George M. Cohan


 * From Barrelhouse To Broadway: The Music Of Joe Jordan


 * The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (Finally) Plays 'The Entertainer'


 * Black Manhattan: Music Of The Famous 'Clef Club'


 * 'Round The Christmas Tree


 * More Candy


 * On The Level...Songs Of Vaudeville & Tin Pan Alley


 * Knockout Drops


 * That Demon Rag!


 * The Whistler And His Dog


 * On The Boardwalk

Videography

 * Paragon's Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks


 * Paragon's Charlie Chaplin Moving Picture Show