The New England Ragtime Ensemble

The New England Ragtime Ensemble (originally The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble) was a Boston chamber orchestra dedicated to the music of Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.

Conservatory president Gunther Schuller created the 12-member student ensemble in 1972 for a festival of romantic American music, at which the group performed some of Schuller's own editions of orchestrated versions of Joplin's piano rags. These period arrangements from the collection "Standard High-Class Rags", commonly known in early accounts as the Red Backed Book (later shortened to The Red Back Book), had been preserved by New Orleans musician Bill Russell and forwarded to Schuller by pianist and music historian Vera Brodsky Lawrence. In 1973 the group's performance at the Smithsonian Institution led to a recording for Angel Records. Orchestrations for later repertoire included oboe, bassoon, French horn and guitar and banjo, a routine period practice.

"The Red Back Book" earned a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of 1973. It spent 54 weeks on Billboard's Top 100 Albums List; 84 weeks on the Top Classical Albums List, including 6 separate appearances at #1; and 12 weeks on the Top Jazz Album List. It was the magazine's Top Classical Album of 1974.

The ensemble's second recording, "More Scott Joplin Rags", spent 26 weeks on the Top Classical list, earning a #7 ranking for 5 weeks.

Beginning in 1973 the ensemble began a tour of major American and Canadian venues, including sold-out performances at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, where they would play seven more times; Tanglewood; the Blossom Music Center and the Ravinia Festival; the Newport Music Festival; the Saratoga Performing Arts Center as well as headlining the inaugural Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri.

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