Ragtime is the lively syncopated music that originated in the midwest in the 1890s and flourished throughout the U.S. and even in Europe through 1917. In the hands of a master composer like Scott Joplin, ragtime became a proven vehicle for serious musical expression: as early as 1903, Joplin had even written an entire opera in ragtime.

Various elements of ragtime music helped form the foundation of jazz, later being incorporated into many diverse styles of American popular music. Ragtime enjoyed revivals in the 1940s and again in the late ’50s and ’60s, but its most monumental revival came in the 1970s, when Joplin’s rags were featured in the hit movie “The Sting.”

Eric Marchese, an Orange County, Calif.-based ragtime pianist and composer, notes that ragtime societies and festivals first began to spring up in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1950s.

“Ragtime festivals have enjoyed widespread support and increasing attendance since the 1970s,” states Marchese, who attended his first ragtime festival in central California in the late 1980s. Within a year, he visited Sedalia, MO, home of the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival.

Marchese said he was “always puzzled that an area as heavily populated as Southern California lacked an annual ragtime festival.” The region, he notes, has enjoyed a variety of isolated ragtime concerts, “and even a couple of festival-style events,” on an annual basis – but no festival.

Ultimately, in early 2000, Marchese joined forces with Friends of Jazz, Inc., a Fullerton, CA-based non-profit organization, and founded RagFest, an annual ragtime festival based in Orange County. As RagFest’s founding artistic director, he’s been coordinating the event ever since, handling the planning, hiring the musicians, acting as Master of Ceremonies and even offering a few pieces at the piano.

With the event now in its ninth year, Marchese said he’s happy to see so much support from within the community and from Friends of Jazz. He said that the group – an all-volunteer organization dedicated to promoting the continued growth and development of jazz performance, appreciation and education – has wholeheartedly embraced ragtime, essentially a separate genre with roots divergent from those of pure jazz.

Marchese said that over the past seven festivals, “Friends of Jazz has created special endowments for several Southern California teens who are studying, performing and composing ragtime music on their own.”

Several of these youngsters, between the ages of 10 and 19, are being featured in a special “Youth Forum” concert at RagFest 2007. The event unfolds at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26, at the Osborne Auditorium of the Fullerton Public Library.

By the same token, launching a ragtime society has given residents of Orange County and beyond two of RagFest’s regular venues – Steamers Jazz Club and Mo’s Fullerton Music – at which to hear live ragtime performance not just in October, during RagFest, but throughout the year.

The Orange County Ragtime Society, or “OCRS,” had its first musicale in November, 2001, and has since had several dozen, spread out through the year from January through September. Both the society and the festival are designed to keep alive the art of ragtime performance, whether at the piano, ragtime’s primary instrument, or through other instruments and vocals. Like the festival, OCRS often features contemporary ragtime compositions as well as those written 100 years ago.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Marchese said – “keeping this wonderful music going well into the 21^st century.”