Leo Roth is a second year piano performance and German student at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He studies piano with Dr. Susan Smith and pipe organ with Dr. Jaebon Hwang. He plays piano in L&C chamber music ensembles, sings in the college Community Chorale, and loves playing the world’s only circular pipe organ, a 1971 Cassavant found in Lewis and Clark’s Agnes Flanagan Chapel.
Leo has always had a deep passion for many types of music and was first introduced to the ragtime community at age eleven when he, intending to learn all he could about where Scott Joplin wrote and composed ragtime, visited the KATY Depot in Sedalia, MO, the Cradle of Ragtime. In 2021 (at age fourteen), Leo was named the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation’s inaugural Ragtime Kid. This opportunity allowed him to perform and give a symposium on Theron C. Bennett, a ragtime composer, pianist, and publisher from Pierce City, MO, in 2022. Leo has returned to the Joplin Festival as a performer ever since. He is also a passionate collector of ragtime era sheet music and piano rolls. He is excited to spread the joy of ragtime music and its history in Chicagoland at the inaugural Fox River Ragtime Festival!
Listen to Leo Roth: