Joshua Rifkin

Joshua Rifkin (born April 22, 1944) is an American conductor, pianist, and musicologist. He is currently a professor of music at Boston University. As a performer he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas, and as a scholar has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century.

Rifkin is known among classical musicians for his theory that most of Bach’s choral works were sung with only one singer per choral line. Rifkin argued that “so long as we define ‘chorus’ in the conventional modern sense, then Bach’s chorus, with few exceptions, simply did not exist.” He is best known, however, for having played a central role in the ragtime revival in the 1970s, with the three albums he recorded of Scott Joplin’s works for Nonesuch Records.

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