This Week's Jazz
Maple Leaf Rag
Scott Joplin
1899
Scott Joplin walked into John Stark's music store in Sedalia, Missouri, sometime in 1899 and played a composition that would sell over a million copies of sheet music and make ragtime the dominant popular music in America for the next fifteen years.
This Week's Classical
Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1788
In the summer of 1788, Mozart was broke, ignored by the Viennese public, borrowing money from Michael Puchberg with letters so abject they make you want to reach through time and hand him a check. His infant daughter Theresia had just died. His wife Constanze was ill.