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    André 3000 Drops Surprise Album After Met Gala Piano Statement

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    The rapper and musician’s miniature Steinway teased his new album, “7 piano sketches,” which he released on Monday.It can be a challenge to make an impression on the Met Gala’s red carpet, especially when the competition includes Diana Ross wearing a feathered overcoat with an 18-foot-long train, Bad Bunny toting a bag fit for a bowling ball, and Rihanna arriving fashionably late — with a baby bump.But there are spectacles and there are spectacles, and André 3000 fit nicely into the latter category when he showed up to the festivities on Monday night with a grand piano strapped to his back.“I’m sorry,” the actress Natasha Lyonne said while being interviewed on the red carpet, “there’s a piano coming.”It was a statement piece and a nifty bit of marketing by André 3000, a rapper and musician whose appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit coincided with the release of his new album, “7 piano sketches,” which he described in an Instagram post as “improvisations” and included a drawing of himself in a version of his Met Gala outfit. The instrumental piano album follows one in which he focused entirely on the flute — a sharp departure from his days in the rap duo Outkast.Beyond the promotion of his new album, his outfit on Monday was carefully planned, both to highlight the event’s theme, which centered on Black style and dandyism, and its dress code, “Tailored For You.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Frick Needs a New Piano. Which Would You Choose?

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      On a recent morning, the pianist Jeremy Denk got an early look at the renovated Frick Collection. Not the art: He took an elevator straight down to the museum’s new auditorium where, on entering, he held a hand to his chin and surveyed the three Steinway pianos lined up across the stage like pageant queens.He walked to an ornate and glossy rosewood grand from 1882, and warmed up with some music by Bach before jumping around, to Beethoven’s Op. 111 sonata and other hits of the piano repertoire. Denk asked if anyone in the room had a request. He was, he said, “happy to be a jukebox.”But he was also there with a serious task. The Frick’s old Music Room, a haven for chamber performances, rented its piano, said Jeremy Ney, the museum’s new head of music and performance. So Annabelle Selldorf’s renovation and expansion of the Frick, which includes a 220-seat auditorium that sounds like a world-class concert hall and looks like the inside of a flower, was an opportunity to purchase a new instrument.The question was, what kind?With a team that included Raj Patel, the acoustician who worked on the auditorium, Ney assembled a trio of pianos to choose from, all Model D Steinways but with distinct sounds based on when they were made and where: the 1882 one, nicknamed Palisandra; another, from 1965, called Volodya; and a 2017 concert grand made in Hamburg, Germany.Over the past several weeks, a handful of pianists passed through to sample them and offer their thoughts ahead of the hall’s opening festival, April 26 through May 11. Denk was one, spending a couple of hours to play each instrument and suggest which the Frick should buy. He skipped around musical eras, playing excerpts from “pieces that require color,” he said, “pieces that feature lyricism, pieces where you need clarity and speed.”

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0}@media(min-width:740px){.summary.response .video p.credit{font-size:.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;margin-left:0;margin-right:0}}1 of 2Which would you choose?Your browser does not support the audio element.0%Palisandra, the 1882 rosewood grandYour browser does not support the audio element.0%Volodya, the bright 1965 grandYour browser does not support the audio element.0%The modern Hamburg from 20172 of 2Which did the Frick buy?Your browser does not support the audio element.0%Palisandra, the 1882 rosewood grandYour browser does not support the audio element.0%Volodya, the bright 1965 grandYour browser does not support the audio element.0%The modern Hamburg from 2017

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      Hania Rani’s Music Is Tranquil. Please Don’t Call It ‘Soothing.’

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      The Polish musician is a mainstay of streaming playlists with names like “Calm Vibes.” But she bristles at the notion that her music is therapeutic.When the Polish musician Hania Rani released her first solo album, “Esja,” in 2019, she knew it was a modest debut. Its subtle piano compositions were moody but pared down, and she worried that its serene atmosphere might limit its mainstream appeal.One year later, the album’s placid vibe turned out to be a blessing. As the world locked down against the Covid pandemic, distressed people were turning to streaming playlists with names like “Calm Vibes” and “Peaceful Rhythms” that featured Rani’s music. It became a breakthrough moment. As one critic told BBC radio during lockdown, Rani’s music “makes your problems and woes all sort of vanish.”But now, Rani, 34, has become a shooting star in a genre of pop-inflected minimalist music often referred to as neoclassical, or alt-classical — though she bristles at the notion that her music is meant to offer therapy. “It’s not being composed to help people relax,” she said in a recent interview. “The music might be slow — not so loud, not upbeat — but it’s actually intense.”Her critically lauded follow-up solo albums — “Home” (2020) and “Ghosts” (2023) — have made her one of the biggest names in neoclassical music. Rani has won seven Fryderyk Awards, Poland’s equivalent to the Grammys, and prompted comparisons to other big-name contemporary composers, such as Nils Frahm and Max Richter.Her live shows have also drawn online attention, including a 2022 performance in Paris that has garnered nine million views on YouTube. In recent months, she has embarked on a largely sold-out tour through some of the world’s best-known concert halls, including the Sydney Opera House and the Berlin Philharmonie.Rani has won four Fryderyk Awards, Poland’s equivalent to the Grammys.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Remo Saraceni, 89, Dies; Inventor of the Walking Piano Seen in ‘Big’

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      His keyboard, which became famous after Tom Hanks melodiously hopped on it, displayed Mr. Saraceni’s vision of technology powered by “people energy.”Remo Saraceni, a sculptor, toy inventor and technological fantasist best known for creating the Walking Piano that Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced on in a beloved scene of the hit 1988 movie “Big,” died on June 3 in Swarthmore, Pa. He was 89.The cause was heart failure, said Benjamin Medaugh, his assistant and caretaker. Mr. Saraceni died at Mr. Medaugh’s home, where he had been living in recent years.Mr. Saraceni’s specialty was “interactive electronics,” he told New York magazine in 1976. His other inventions included a clock that could reply aloud when you asked it the time, a stethoscope stereo system that could boom out your heartbeat, and Plexiglas clouds that lit up at the sound of a whistle with a pastel color appropriate for a room’s lighting. All were powered by what Mr. Saraceni (pronounced SAR-ah-SAY-nee) called “people energy”: the voice, touch and heat of the human body.The power of this sort of technology to enchant its users became a pivotal plot element of “Big,” and in turn the central prop in one of the most fondly recalled scenes in recent movie history.After wishing to be “big” at a magical Zoltar fortunetelling machine, the movie’s main character, Josh Baskin, transforms from a 12-year-old boy into a young adult (played by Mr. Hanks). He gets a clerical job at a toy company whose owner, Mac (Robert Loggia), recognizes Josh as his employee one Saturday at F.A.O. Schwarz. Mac is a shrewd capitalist surveying his industry in action; Josh is a boy exulting in the world of toys (albeit in a man’s body).As Josh impresses Mac with his close knowledge of F.A.O. Schwarz’s wares, they happen upon Mr. Saraceni’s nearly 16-foot-long Walking Piano. With childlike absorption, Josh begins hopping on it to the tune of “Heart and Soul.” Mac, inspired by Josh’s un-self-conscious delight, joins him, making the performance a duet. To an awe-struck crowd, the two of them then do a rendition of “Chopsticks.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Piano From Titanic’s Sister Ship, Olympic, Awaits an Audience

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      A gilt-trimmed upright Steinway piano commissioned in 1912 for the ocean liner Olympic is on dry land and ready to be heard again.This article is part of our Design special section about water as a source of creativity.During the Titanic’s maiden voyage, musicians played pianos from Steinway & Sons to entertain passengers with waltzes and opera overtures. A twin of one of the ship’s Steinway instruments has been found in northern England, and a new nonprofit organization is gearing up to return it to the limelight.The gilt-trimmed walnut upright, now at the showroom of Besbrode Pianos in Leeds, was commissioned in 1912 for the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic. It was made by the same craftspeople, and in the same style and materials, as its disintegrated counterparts underwater near Newfoundland. But before its provenance trail was traced in the last few years, “Nobody showed the slightest bit of interest in it,” said Melvin Besbrode, the showroom’s owner.The nonprofit RMS Olympic Steinway Association aims to raise about $125,000 to acquire it and make it publicly accessible. The only other Olympic piano known to survive is a Steinway grand with checkerboard inlays, which the musician Bill Wyman sold through Sotheby’s in 1994 for about $38,000. Its current location is a mystery. “No one can hear it, no one can see it, and we don’t want that to happen again,” said Patrick Cornelius Vida, an Austrian musician who is the association’s president.The Olympic, circa 1911.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesMr. Vida has made pilgrimages to Besbrode Pianos to bask in the upright’s aura and used it for filmed performances of 1910s music. “It’s stayed within my soul, within my memory,” he said. “It’s a grand old lady who’s young at heart.”The association has made a documentary, explaining that the piano’s “timber, character and tonal quality” are nearly identical to what Titanic passengers heard. When the Besbrode piano was in use for decades aboard the Olympic (which was scrapped in 1935), the passengers included Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Maurizio Pollini, Celebrated Pianist Who Defined Modernism, Dies at 82

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      His recordings of Beethoven and Chopin were hailed as classics, but his technical ability sometimes invited controversy.Maurizio Pollini, an Italian pianist of formidable intellectual powers whose unrivaled technique and unwavering interpretive integrity made him the modernist master of the instrument, died on Saturday morning in Milan. He was 82.His death, in a clinic, was announced by the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he performed frequently. The announcement did not specify a cause, but Mr. Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems and had pulled out of a number of subsequent recitals.Mr. Pollini, who performed for more than half a century, was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called “a very high ethical regard of music.”Whether he played Beethoven, Schumann or Stockhausen, Mr. Pollini was almost unmatched in his capabilities. He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across “as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,” the critic Edward Said once wrote, but instead as a technique that “allows you to forget technique entirely.”There were, however, many listeners who could not forget that technique, and Mr. Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano; one of his few equals in sheer ability, Sviatoslav Richter, privately complained of hearing Mr. Pollini play Chopin on the radio with “no poetry or delicacy (even if everything’s impeccably precise).”“It was not a very imaginative performance,” Harold Schonberg of The New York Times said in his review of Mr. Pollini’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1968, eight years after the pianist had stormed to victory in the sixth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw — the first Westerner to do so, and at only 18. “With all his skill,” Mr. Schonberg continued, “Mr. Pollini failed to suggest that he was deeply involved in the music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      These Keyboard Musicians Are Thinking Beyond the Piano

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      Phyllis Chen began studying the piano at age 5, learning from a strict, traditional teacher who taught her the standard repertoire. She was a passionate musician, but sometimes wondered how much of her playing was artistic, rather than purely athletic.“I never found it to be entirely fulfilling,” Chen said in a video interview. “I always thought there was something missing.”Chen, 45, was pursuing graduate studies at Indiana University when she first encountered the toy piano, an instrument with a brittle, xylophone-like sound usually around 20 inches long, with a range of three octaves. Her teacher, the virtuoso pianist André Watts, was a Liszt specialist but encouraged her to pursue her own interests.Once, Watts tried Chen’s toy piano; the keys were so small and his hands so big that he struggled to play a single note at a time. But for her, playing the unusual instrument was liberating. “I was very excited to be able to explore without all of the traditional boundaries being tied to it,” she said. “No one was going to tell me: ‘This is the canon of works. This is how it needs to be played.’”She is among the growing number of keyboardists expanding their practice beyond the modern piano — that instrument so central to classical music, with its large and historically important repertoire, orchestral heft and essential role in teaching. But for these pianists, learning to play other keyboards has been invigorating. On these less prominent instruments, they have explored unfamiliar timbral terrain, re-examined their approaches to canonical works and created new repertoire. They return to the modern piano with greater aural and tactile sensitivity, feeling a renewed sense of freedom and purpose at the instrument.Chen was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001. A few years later, she was extremely busy, traveling between New York and Chicago to perform and attending university in Bloomington, Ind., when she got tendinitis in both arms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Max Morath, Pianist Who Staged a One-Man Ragtime Revival, Dies at 96

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      A student of both music and history, he entertained audiences in the 1960s and beyond while educating them about a genre whose heyday had ended decades earlier.Max Morath, who stepped out of the 1890s only a lifetime late, and with syncopated piano rhythms and social commentary helped revive the ragtime age on educational television programs, in concert halls and in nightclubs for nearly a half-century, died on Monday at a care facility near his home in Duluth, Minn. He was 96.His wife, Diane Fay Skomars, confirmed the death.Having learned the rudiments of music from his mother, who played a tinkling piano in movie theaters for silent films, Mr. Morath — after false career starts as a radio announcer, newscaster and actor — found his calling in a fascination with ragtime, the uniquely syncopated, “ragged” style whose heyday spanned two decades, roughly from 1897 to 1917.A college-educated student of both music and history, Mr. Morath fell in love with ragtime’s dreamlike, bittersweet sounds. He researched the styles and repertoires of its era. He combed libraries, studied piano rolls and old sheet music, consulted historical societies, read antique magazines and talked to folks old enough to recall the work of the ragtime greats and the milestones of their age.What emerged was a new form of entertainment that combined showmanship with scholarly commentaries on ragtime itself, on its players and fans, and on the etiquette and tastes of a long-vanished age when horses pulled streetcars and women’s suffrage was still just a dream of the future.In a straw boater and sleeve garters, pounding an old upright with a cigar clenched in his teeth, Mr. Morath played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” and Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag.” In those moments he might have been a vaudeville copycat trading on nostalgia. But his mood grew serious — and strangely more engaging — when he paused to tell audiences what they were hearing.“Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he would explain. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.“Classic ragtime isn’t the honky-tonk music you hear today. That’s just a popular misconception. Nobody has paid the classic ragtime much attention, because of the attitude that folk music had to come from the hills. We were looking in the wrong direction.”Mr. Morath made ragtime come alive again. In the 1890s, he said, people heard it in vaudeville houses or just walking around town. There were newfangled inventions: player pianos, phonographs and nickelodeons. Middle-class homes had upright pianos. Sheet music was booming. Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan home of the songwriters who dominated popular music, was flourishing.After a few years in clubs and on radio and television in the West and in his native Colorado, Mr. Morath broke through in 1960 at KRMA-TV, Denver’s educational TV station. He wrote and produced “The Ragtime Era,” a series of 12 half-hour shows on the music and history of ragtime and the blues, as well as the origins of musical comedy and Tin Pan Alley, for the 60-station National Educational Television network, the predecessor of PBS.Reviewing that series for The New York Times, Jack Gould wrote: “In an uncommon mixture of earthiness, emphasized by his chewing of a big cigar and wearing of loud vests, and erudition, reflected in his knowledgeable commentary on music and the social forces that influence its expression, he presides over a wonderful rag piano and lets go.”The series was bought by commercial stations, greatly expanding Mr. Morath’s audience. He was soon juggling recording dates, college gigs (some 50 a year), and concert and club bookings. He also crafted another NET series, “The Turn of the Century” (1962): 15 installments that related ragtime music to its social, economic and political period, using lantern slides, photographs and other props.Mr. Morath in 1969. “Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he said. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.”via Colorado Music ExperienceWith its wider focus — on life in America from 1890 to the 1920s — “The Turn of the Century” was a runaway success. In addition to being seen in syndication on commercial television, it became a one-man theatrical show. Mr. Morath presented it at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard in New York, brought it to the Off Broadway Jan Hus Playhouse in 1969 and then toured nationally for many years.“In a two-hour jaunty excursion, Morath gives us a look at the 30-year period that spanned the time of McGuffey’s Reader, women’s suffrage, the grizzly bear dance, Prohibition, legal marijuana and Teddy Roosevelt,” The Washington Post said when Mr. Morath opened at Ford’s Theater in 1970. “It was a time of sweeping changes in the moral climate of our nation, and Morath uses popular music, chiefly ragtime, as the centrifugal force for sorting out the different phases.”As the ragtime revival surged into the 1970s, it was given momentum by the musicologist Joshua Rifkin, who recorded much of Scott Joplin’s work for the Nonesuch label in 1971, and by the success of George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning film “The Sting” (1973), starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as con artists, which featured Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the soundtrack.Mr. Morath appeared on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall,” “Today,” “The Tonight Show” and Arthur Godfrey’s radio and television programs. A series of Morath productions — “The Ragtime Years,” “Living the Ragtime Life,” “The Ragtime Man,” “Ragtime Revisited,” and “Ragtime and Again” — opened Off Broadway and were followed by national tours.“I must have played in 5,000 different places, and many of them were not all that classy,” Mr. Morath said in 2019 in an interview for this obituary. “Mostly they were saloons, and it wasn’t all ragtime either. Some of them were piano bars. When you work a piano bar, you’d better know 1,500 tunes. You’re playing requests. It was Gershwin. Cole Porter. Rodgers and Hart.”Mr. Morath continued touring until he retired in 2007. By then, he had long been known as “Mr. Ragtime,” the unofficial keeper of America’s ragtime legacy.Asked for a favorite memory from his life in music, he reached back to his childhood.“Actually,” he said after a moment’s thought, “it was when I was 7 and I heard my mother play something Joplin wrote, called ‘The Original Rag.’ It was published in Kansas City, and somehow my mother got ahold of it. We had a piano bench full of good stuff, mostly show tunes. But ‘Original Rag’ was my favorite.”Max Edward Morath was born in Colorado Springs on Oct. 1, 1926, the younger of two sons of Frederic Morath, a real estate broker, and Gladys (Ramsell) Morath. When Max was 4, his parents divorced. His mother became society editor of The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and his father went to Europe, remarried and spent his days climbing in the Alps and the Pyrenees.Max and his brother, Frederic, attended local public schools. He was active in choir and theater at Colorado Springs High School and, in his senior year, got a job as a radio announcer with KVOR (the call letters stand for Voice of the Rockies). After he graduated in 1944, he paid his way through Colorado College as a pianist and newscaster for the station. He majored in English and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.In 1953, he married Norma Loy Tackitt. They had three children before divorcing in 1992. He married Ms. Skomars, an author and photographer, in 1993.In addition to his wife, Mr. Morath is survived by two daughters, Kathryn Morath and Christy Mainthow; a son, Frederic; a stepdaughter, Monette Fay Magrath; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson. His brother died in 2009.In a recording career that began in 1955, Mr. Morath made more than 30 albums, mostly of unaccompanied piano solos, for Epic, RCA Victor, Vanguard and other labels. His original compositions were recorded by the pianist and composer Aaron Robinson and released in 2015 as “Max Morath: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano.”Mr. Morath wrote an illustrated memoir, “The Road to Ragtime” (1999), and “I Love You Truly: A Biographical Novel Based on the Life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond” (2008), about the first woman to establish a music publishing firm in America. She had been the subject of a paper Mr. Morath wrote for his master’s degree, which he earned at Columbia University in 1996.In 2016, Mr. Morath was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, along with the bandleaders Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller. “It made me feel really great,” he said. “Of course, they’re both Colorado boys. I felt I was in very good company.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More