Our society is obsessed with the present. Twenty-four hour media outlets report any newsworthy subject the instant it occurs. Websites like Twitter and Facebook allow people to tell the world what they are doing at any given moment. Smartphones can be set to ring every time the owner’s favorite baseball team scores a run. Dominos, the famous pizza delivery company, allows people to track their orders from placing an order to delivery.

The flow of information is endless; people flock to it like Niagra Falls. However, all too often, this perpetual, societal flood of knowledge erodes our appreciation for the past.

While instances of such erosion can be found in multiple facets of society, I recently discovered its prevalence in music. The epitome of this collective forgetfulness can be observed through a comparison of two groundbreaking musicians whose career apexes were approximately 85 years apart: Michael Jackson and Scott Joplin.

When Jackson died last summer he was working on his magnum opus. The “This Is It” tour was to be Jackson’s final farewell, a salutation to the countless number of his devoted fans across the world. When Jackson died, he had won 18 Grammy awards, revolutionized music videos, and helped to bring African American music to the mainstream.

When Joplin died in 1917, he was also heavily entrenched in his magnum opus. “Treemonisha,” an opera depicting life as a slave for a young girl on a plantation in Arkansas, was going to be Joplin’s big break, his chance to elevate African American music from honky tonks to opera houses and make an America just over thirty years removed from the Reconstruction era realize that black music was a force to be reckoned with.

Before his death, Joplin had witnessed his “Maple Leaf Rag” reach national popularity, and saw his song “Cascades” played at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and was ready to further his national reputation. So, what’s the difference between Jackson and Joplin, two accomplished musicians both perfecting their finest work’s at their deaths?

Timing.

When Jackson died there was a media frenzy, a lavish funeral at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, and the video recordings of his rehearsals for the “This Is It” tour were immediately made into a movie.

When Joplin died he was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Michael’s cemetery in New York and “Treemonisha” had not been performed and would not see the stage until 1972.

Last summer, I was reminded on a nearly daily basis by the media that Jackson was a musical genius, a legendary performer, and a fixture in our society. However, it was not until this January when I was driving down highway 40 and saw the brown sign which reads “Scott Joplin House State Historic Site” that I was reminded of my first visit to Joplin’s house in the second grade, how excited I was to discover his music, and how blind I had been since to his importance in creating America’s current popular music landscape. I quickly realized that the nature of our society had caused me to lose sight of the relationship between the present and the past.

With February being Black History Month, and as a fellow composer of music myself, I felt obligated to visit the house again and investigate Joplin’s music and life to a greater extent. I came to appreciate the work of an artist who, living in St. Louis was at the core of the ragtime explosion of the early 1900s, was at the right place in the wrong time, and as a consequence, did not reap the benefits of the modern day media.

Our society needs reminders of how the past continues to influence the present. As I walked through the doors of 2658A Delmar, where Joplin lived intermittently from 1901 to 1907, I heard, read, and saw Joplin’s legacy, was reminded of his greatness, and recognized his relevance to our world today.

When I visited, I was fortunate enough to meet Bryan Cather, a researcher of ragtime and volunteer at the Joplin house. Cather further developed my appreciation for Joplin’s impact on American music and began to do so with another comparison of Joplin to a famous musician. This time, Cather compared Joplin to one of his predecessors.

“Joplin was to American popular music what J.S. Bach was to classical music,” Cather said. “Bach’s music laid the formational groundwork for everything that came after it. The case is much the same with Joplin, in popular music. Everything that has come after it, in terms of American popular music, from jazz, blues and swing, to rock, hip hop, trance and techno, can trace its origins back to the music of Scott Joplin.”

Cather spent many hours listening to ragtime music at the local library in his hometown of Arlington, Texas, but first became interested in ragtime, and particularly the music of Scott Joplin, thanks to the soundtrack for the movie “The Sting.” He soon found that he wasn’t the only one who had discovered a love for rags thanks to this revival.

“‘The Sting’ put ragtime back into the mix of popular music as it hadn’t been in 60 years or so,” Cather said. “You could not go out in public anywhere without hearing ‘The Entertainer’ [one of Joplin’s most famous rags]. Radio stations played it, people hummed it, whistled it, it was on the background music in malls and stores. It was inescapable. People liked it, and, for the first in a very long time, Scott Joplin’s name was one that ever kid taking piano lessons knew, because if anyone knew you played, the first thing they’d ask for was ‘The Sting.’”

Cather soon also realized the importance of ragtime music to American culture.

“[Ragtime] gave us the ability to say to the world, ‘here is something that is ours, that we created ourselves, out of our own people, our own experience,” Cather said. “That the rest of the world looked upon it, and pronounced it good, should give us immense pride.”

But the renewed nationwide appreciation for ragtime music was short lived. Soon, new movies came along with new soundtracks that captivated audiences just as “The Sting” had and except for a few people like Cather, ragtime music faded from the media spotlight and became irrelevant.

Cather observed that as a consequence society mistakenly developed the belief that ragtime was a thing of the past.

“The biggest misconception about ragtime might be that ‘no one listens to it,’” Cather said. “To debunk that, look at the throngs of people at the various festivals. Concert halls are packed. People love this stuff.”

Cather is also the co-editor of a newsletter for the Friends of Scott Joplin, a ragtime society in St. Louis, which holds various ragtime festivals, a monthly open piano night at Dressel’s pub in the Central West End, and even has its own online radio station.

However, this does not change the fact that many people are still too caught up in the present to look back at the past. To these individuals, Cather has a strong message.

“Ragtime is not a dead form,” Cather said. “It’s being composed, performed, recorded, bought, sold and enjoyed. To anyone who turns up their nose and says ‘all this is old music,’ I just reply that an old song I’ve never heard is a new song to my ears.”

And perhaps Cather’s mantra is how we should approach our past. To many people, ragtime, along with countless other artifacts of our history, is an unknown entity, a new song they have never heard. Maybe, if we continue to preach the relevance of the past to our present, pioneers like Scott Joplin will receive the lasting credit they deserve.