Martin Spitznagel Pianist. Composer. Writer. Filmmaker.

I didn’t learn how to play the piano the traditional way. I took about 6 months of classical lessons when I was eight years old, and my poor teacher endured 6 months of a student who refused to practice. I wasn’t interested in scales and arpeggios. I wanted to play what my sister played: the “Spinning Song,” the “Bumble Boogie.” I didn’t see how this led to that, how scales led to songs led to scherzos. I just wanted to play and have fun.

It wasn’t until I discovered ragtime that I found a music that allowed me, that in fact challenged me, to do just that. I was 12. In a general music class at school, one of the boys came in and played a piece on the piano that sounded like nothing I had ever heard. All of the children gathered around the piano, myself included, and watched his hands fly across the keyboard, some sort of wizard, captivating all of us. After class I went up and asked him, breathless, “What kind of music is that?”

“Ragtime,” he said. Ragtime, I thought. I have to play ragtime!

I went out to the local music store and bought the first book I saw with the word “ragtime” in the title, a collection of the works of Scott Joplin. It was a fortuitous choice because, well, no one wrote better rags than Scott Joplin. I remember pressing the book open on the piano to a tune called “Weeping Willow,” and promptly realizing that I had no idea how to read this kind of music. I remembered “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “FACE,” the few things I remembered from my piano lessons, and painstakingly tried to play through the first page, but it sounded terrible. Notes didn’t line up in this music, the left hand was constantly changing, and the right hand had nothing to do with the left. So, I did what anyone would do: I went out and bought a CD of Scott Joplin, and I listened to it nonstop.

Two years later, I won Calliope Media’s “Crazy for Ragtime” competition. They gave me a piano. Seriously. By then, ragtime had become my life.

My ragtime self-education had many upsides. For starters, I only had to learn the pieces that interested me, so I never, ever got bored or wanted to quit. Second, it forced me to develop a strong ear and a talent for improvisation because the only way I could make it through a piece was to absorb everything in it like a sponge and steal all of its tricks before moving on. And third, I had the luxury of trial and error, so the things that I did learn, I learned well, and I developed a sound that is my own.

Like any self-taught person, however, for every check mark in the “plus” column, there were gaping holes in my approach, my technique and my understanding.

That’s when I met Prof. Tony Caramia, who changed my life, musical and otherwise.

I don’t know what his first words to me were (probably “hello”), but the following words, made after listening to me play, were variations of, “Where is the feeling? Where is the emotion? Where is the surprise?” He told me, in no uncertain terms, that my playing lacked “testosterone.” Chutzpah. Cajones. And in front of my mother, no less. He told me that I flitted across the keys, barely disturbing the deep musical waters underneath, and make no mistake, I was playing hard pieces: Charleston Rag, Maple Leaf Rag, pieces I that my nigh-illiterate musical self had no business playing. I thought that, because they were hard, my being able to play them made me good.

After our first lesson, I went down to the practice rooms at the Eastman School of Music and fell apart. I had never met a musician who asked so much of me before, and in that moment I had a sudden, terrible thought: What if I was nothing more than a hack, a kid with fast fingers but nothing to say, a one-trick sideshow? What if I couldn’t get better?

As the years started toppling onto one another, however, and as I continued to work hard, I realized that what Prof. Caramia had challenged me to do was not to give up. Far from it. Instead, he had seen in me something worth fighting for and challenged me to find my voice in the music, find what it was that I could bring that no one else could. “Martinizing,” he called it. He challenged me to bring myself to the music, not just take from it only what felt good, and that has made all the difference.

Ragtime is something that I’ve loved for years. This is the music that is in my heart, and it is my sincere hope that you derive joy from listening to my performances. I try to play with feeling, with sweetness, and always with a healthy dose of testosterone. After all, ragtime is sexy. Ragtime is vibrant, colorful, sparkling, melancholy, exuberant. In it I find a full range of expressions that is wildly satisfying as a fan and as a pianist.

So, enjoy! And may this not be your only trip into the world of ragtime!