Rod Anderson has goofed around on the piano all his life -- beginning over half a century ago with lessons from Edmund Cohu at Trinity College School in Port Hope, ON. In 1959, while he was preparing to write the final chartered accounting exams, a friend introduced him to ragtime -- and specifically Scott Joplin's wonderful Maple Leaf Rag. You can only study so long for exams without taking a break, so every couple of hours Rod would take a break and practice the Maple Leaf Rag. By the time he wrote the CA exams (he was lucky and got the gold medal for first place in Ontario) he could play the Maple Leaf. Subsequently, he went on to learn many others of the Joplin rags. Then, some 13 years later, in the 1970s, he began to compose his own rags. In part this was for comic relief from a high-pressure job (by 1979 managing partner of the Toronto Office of Clarkson Gordon -- now Ernst & Young). Many years later (in 1994) he took up composing 'contemporary classical' music (for lack of a better term) -- after discovering how well MIDI synthesizers give one the ability to hear one's mistakes immediately during the composing process (without having to wait for a live performance to reveal all the embarrassing flaws). But that music is on a different part of this website. In this part here, we are dealing with ragtime, which Rod still enjoys.
In the early 1990s he could still remember a number of his rags and performed some of them one evening at the Oasis Bar and Grill in Cobourg. But since then finger memories have gradually faded -- and foolishly he'd never written most of the rags down. Fortunately he had an old cassette recording of his own performance of all of these rags back in the 1970s. In November 2006 a ragtime concert in Quebec City forced him to resurrect and score some of these almost forgotten rags from the 1970s. Some of that score re-creation is continuing. In March 2007 he performed some of his newly re-learned rags at a house concert in Cobourg.
Rod is married to sculptor/painter, novelist/poet, (and, more recently, soprano) Merike Lugus.
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