Ragtime

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This article is about ragtime music. For other uses, see Ragtime
(disambiguation).

Ragtime (music)

Stylistic origins

Cakewalk, Jig, classical music,
March

Cultural origins

1890s: US

Typical instruments

Mainly piano, sometimes banjo orchestra,
brass band

Mainstream popularity

1900s, 1910s, & 1970s

Derivative forms

Stride, novelty piano, honky tonk

Fusion genres

Jazz - boogie woogie - bluegrass

Second edition cover of "Maple Leaf Rag." It is one
of the most famous rags.

Ragtime (alternately spelled rag-time)[1]
is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and
1918.[2]
Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged,"
rhythm.[2]
It began as dance music in the red-light districts
of American cities such as St. Louis and New
Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano.[3][4]
It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa,
with additional polyrhythms coming from
African music.[5]
The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous
through the publication in 1899 of the "Maple Leaf Rag" and a
string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but
a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime
revival in the early 1970s.[6][7]
For at least 12 years after its publication, the "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily
influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric
patterns.[8]

Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public's
imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since as the music
has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s many jazz bands began to
include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 RPM records. A more
significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime styles
of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed,
published, and recorded. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin brought out
a compilation of Scott Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy
Award,[9]
and in 1973, the motion picture The Sting brought ragtime
to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. Subsequently, the film's
rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer"
was a Top 5 hit in 1974.

Ragtime (with Joplin's work in the forefront) has been cited as an American
equivalent of minuets by Mozart, mazurkas by Chopin, or waltzes by Brahms.[10]
Ragtime influenced Classical composers
including Claude Debussy and Igor
Stravinsky.[11]

Contents

1 Historical
context

2 Musical
form

3 Styles of
ragtime

4 Ragtime
revivals

5 Ragtime
composers

6 Samples

7 References

8 Further
reading

9 External
links

[edit]
Historical context

Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century,
descending from the jigs and march music played by black bands.[12]
By the start of the 20th century it became widely popular throughout North
America and was listened and danced to, performed, and written by people of many
different subcultures. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be
considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music,
especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.

Joseph Lamb's 1916 "The Top
Liner Rag," a classic
rag.

Some early piano rags are entitled marches, and "jig" and "rag" were used
interchangeably in the mid-1890s.[12]
Ragtime was also preceded by its close relative the cakewalk. In 1895, black
entertainer Ernest Hogan published two
of the earliest sheet music rags, one of
which ("All Coons Look Alike to Me") eventually sold a million copies.[13]
As fellow Black musician Tom Fletcher said, Hogan was the "first to put on paper
the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians."[14]
While the song's success helped introduce the country to ragtime rhythms, its
use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as "coon songs" because of their
use of extremely racist and stereotypical images of
blacks. In Hogan's later years he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal"
for the song while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger
audience.[15]

The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which
several important early rags were published. In 1899, Scott Joplin's "Maple
Leaf Rag" was published, which became a great hit and demonstrated more
depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime. Ragtime was one of the main
influences on the early development of jazz (along with the blues). Some artists, like Jelly Roll Morton,
were present and performed both ragtime and jazz styles during the period the
two genres overlapped. Jazz largely surpassed ragtime in mainstream popularity
in the early 1920s, although ragtime compositions continue to be written up to
the present, and periodic revivals of popular interest in ragtime occurred in
the 1950s and the 1970s.

The heyday of ragtime predated the widespread availability of sound recording. Like
classical music, and unlike jazz, classical ragtime was and is primarily a
written tradition, being distributed in sheet music rather than
through recordings or by imitation of live performances. Ragtime music was also
distributed via piano rolls for player
pianos. A folk ragtime tradition also
existed before and during the period of classical ragtime (a designation largely
created by Scott Joplin's publisher John Stillwell
Stark), manifesting itself mostly through string bands, banjo and mandolin
clubs (which experienced a burst of popularity during the early 20th Century),
and the like.

A form known as novelty piano (or novelty
ragtime) emerged as the traditional rag was fading in popularity. Where
traditional ragtime depended on amateur pianists and sheet music sales, the
novelty rag took advantage of new advances in piano-roll technology and the
phonograph record to permit a more complex, pyrotechnic, performance-oriented
style of rag to be heard. Chief among the novelty rag composers is Zez
Confrey, whose "Kitten on the Keys"
popularized the style in 1921.

Ragtime also served as the roots for stride
piano, a more improvisational piano style popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
Elements of ragtime found their way into much of the American popular music of
the early 20th century. It also played a central role in the development of the
musical style later referred to as Piedmont blues; indeed,
much of the music played by such artists of the genre as Reverend Gary Davis,
Blind Boy Fuller, Elizabeth Cotten, and
Etta
Baker, could be referred to as "ragtime guitar."[16]

Although most ragtime was composed for piano, transcriptions for other
instruments and ensembles are common, notably including Gunther Schuller's
arrangements of Joplin's rags. Ragtime guitar continued to be popular into the
1930s, usually in the form of songs accompanied by skilled guitar work. Numerous
records emanated from several labels, performed by Blind Blake, Blind Boy
Fuller, Lemon Jefferson, and others. Occasionally ragtime was scored for
ensembles, (particularly dance bands and brass bands) similar to those
of James Reese Europe,
or as songs like those written by Irving Berlin. Joplin had
long-standing ambitions for the synthesizing for the worlds of ragtime and opera, to which end
the opera Treemonisha was written.
However its first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the
piano, was "disastrous" and it was never to be fully performed again in Joplin's
lifetime.[17]
In fact the score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, with a fully
orchestrated and staged performance in 1972.[18]
An earlier opera by Joplin, A Guest of Honor, has been lost.[19]

[edit]
Musical form

The rag was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa,
with additional polyrhythms coming from
African music.[5]
It was usually written in 2/4 or 4/4 time with a predominant
left hand pattern of bass notes on odd-numbered beats and chords on
even-numbered beats accompanying a syncopated melody in the
right hand. According to some sources the name "ragtime" may come from the
"ragged or syncopated rhythm" of the right hand.[2]
A rag written in 3/4 time is a "ragtime waltz."

Ragtime is not a "time" (meter) in the same sense that march time is 2/4
meter and waltz time is 3/4 meter; it is rather a musical genre that uses an
effect that can be applied to any meter. The defining characteristic of ragtime
music is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents
occur between metrical beats. This results in a melody that seems to be avoiding
some metrical beats of the accompaniment by emphasizing notes that either
anticipate or follow the beat. The ultimate (and intended) effect on the
listener is actually to accentuate the beat, thereby inducing the listener to
move to the music. Scott Joplin, the composer/pianist known as the "King of
Ragtime", called the effect "weird and intoxicating." He also used the term
"swing" in describing how to play ragtime music: "Play slowly until you catch
the swing...".[20]
The name swing later came to be
applied to an early genre of jazz that developed from ragtime. Converting a
non-ragtime piece of music into ragtime by changing the time values of melody
notes is known as "ragging" the piece. Original ragtime pieces usually contain
several distinct themes, four being the most common number. These themes were
typically 16 bars, each theme divided into periods of four four-bar phrases and
arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Typical patterns were AABBACCC′,
AABBACCDD and AABBCCA, with the first two strains in the tonic key and the
following strains in the subdominant. Sometimes rags would include introductions
of four bars or bridges, between themes, of anywhere between four and 24
bars.[2]

[edit]
Styles of ragtime

Shoe Tickler Rag, cover of the music sheet for a
song from 1911 by Wilbur Campbell.

Ragtime pieces came in a number of different styles during the years of its
popularity and appeared under a number of different descriptive names. It is
related to several earlier styles of music, has close ties with later styles of
music, and was associated with a few musical "fads" of the period such as the foxtrot. Many of the
terms associated with ragtime have inexact definitions, and are defined
differently by different experts; the definitions are muddled further by the
fact that publishers often labelled pieces for the fad of the moment rather than
the true style of the composition. There is even disagreement about the term
"ragtime" itself; experts such as David Jasen and Trebor Tichenor
choose to exclude ragtime songs from the definition but include novelty piano
and stride piano (a modern perspective), while Edward A. Berlin includes ragtime
songs and excludes the later styles (which is closer to how ragtime was viewed
originally). The terms below should not be considered exact, but merely an
attempt to pin down the general meaning of the concept.

Cakewalk - A pre-ragtime
dance form popular until about 1904. The music is intended to be
representative of an African-American dance contest in which the prize is a
cake. Many early rags are cakewalks.

Characteristic
march - A march incorporating idiomatic touches (such as syncopation)
supposedly characteristic of the race of their subject, which is usually
African-Americans. Many early rags are characteristic marches.

Two-step - A
pre-ragtime dance form popular until about 1911. A large number of rags are
two-steps.

Slow drag -
Another dance form associated with early ragtime. A modest number of rags are
slow drags.

Coon
song - A pre-ragtime vocal form popular until about 1901. A song with
crude, racist lyrics often sung by white performers in blackface. Gradually
died out in favor of the ragtime song. Strongly associated with ragtime in its
day, it is one of the things that gave ragtime a bad name.

Ragtime
song - The vocal form of ragtime, more generic in theme than the coon
song. Though this was the form of music most commonly considered "ragtime" in
its day, many people today prefer to put it in the "popular music" category.
Irving Berlin was the
most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs, and his "Alexander's
Ragtime Band" (1911) was the single most widely performed and recorded
piece of this sort, even though it contains virtually no ragtime syncopation.
Gene
Greene was a famous singer in this style.

Folk ragtime - A name
often used to describe ragtime that originated from small towns or assembled
from folk strains, or at least sounded as if they did. Folk
rags often have unusual chromatic features typical of composers with
non-standard training.

Classic rag - A name
used to describe the Missouri-style ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, James
Scott, and others.

Fox-trot - A dance
fad which began in 1913. Fox-trots contain a dotted-note rhythm different from
that of ragtime, but which nonetheless was incorporated into many late
rags.

Novelty piano - A
piano composition emphasizing speed and complexity which emerged after World
War I. It is almost exclusively the domain of white composers.

Stride piano - A
style of piano which emerged after World War I, developed by and dominated by
black East coast pianists (James P. Johnson, Fats
Waller and Willie 'The
Lion' Smith). Together with novelty piano, it may be considered a
successor to ragtime, but is not considered by all to be "genuine" ragtime.
Johnson composed the song that is arguably most associated with the Roaring
Twenties, "Charleston." A
recording of Johnson playing the song appears on the compact disc, James P.
Johnson: Harlem Stride Piano (Jazz Archives No. 111, EPM, Paris, 1997).
Johnson's recorded version has a ragtime flavor.

James Scott's
1904 "On the Pike", which refers to the midway of the St. Louis
World's Fair of 1904.

[edit]
Ragtime revivals

In the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their
repertoire, and as early as 1936 78 RPM records of
Joplin's compositions were produced.[21]
Old numbers written for piano were rescored for jazz instruments by jazz
musicians, which gave the old style a new sound. The most famous recording of
this period is Pee Wee Hunt's version of
Euday L. Bowman's "Twelfth Street
Rag."

A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s. A wider variety of ragtime
styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed,
published, and recorded. Much of the ragtime recorded in this period is
presented in a light-hearted novelty style, looked to with nostalgia as the
product of a supposedly more innocent time. A number of popular recordings
featured "prepared pianos," playing rags on pianos with tacks on the hammers and
the instrument deliberately somewhat out of tune, supposedly to simulate the
sound of a piano in an old honky tonk.

Three events brought forward a different kind of ragtime revival in the
1970s. First, pianist Joshua Rifkin brought out
a compilation of Scott Joplin's work on Nonesuch Records, which
was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best
Classical Performance - Instrumental Soloist(s) without Orchestra" category[9]
in 1971. This recording reintroduced Joplin's music to the public in the manner
the composer had intended, not as a nostalgic stereotype but as serious,
respectable music. Second, the New York Public
Library released a two-volume set of "The Collected Works of Scott Joplin,"
which renewed interest in Joplin among musicians and prompted new stagings of
Joplin's opera
Treemonisha.[18][22]
Finally, with the release of the motion picture The Sting in 1973, which
had a Marvin Hamlisch
soundtrack of Joplin tunes, ragtime was brought to a wide audience. Hamlisch's
rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer" won an Academy Award,[23]
and was an American Top 40 hit in
1974, reaching #3 on 18 May.[24]

In 1998, an adaption of E.L. Doctorow's historic novel, Ragtime was produced
on Broadway. With music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, the show
featured several rags as well as songs in other musical genres.

In modern times, younger musicians have again begun to find ragtime, and
incorporate it into their musical repertoires. Such acts include The
Kitchen Syncopators, Inkwell
Rhythm Makers, Curtains for you, The
Gallus Brothers and the not-quite as young Baby Gramps or Bob
Milne.

[edit]
Ragtime composers

Scott Joplin

By far the most famous ragtime
composer[25]
was Scott Joplin. Joseph
Lamb and James Scott are,
together with Joplin, acknowledged as the three most sophisticated ragtime
composers. Other leading ragtime composers include Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie
Blake, Charles L. Johnson,
Tom
Turpin, May Aufderheide, George Botsford, Zez
Confrey, Ben Harney, Luckey
Roberts, Paul Sarebresole, and
Wilbur Sweatman.

Modern ragtime composers include William Bolcom, Trebor Tichenor, David Thomas
Roberts, and Reginald R.
Robinson.

In addition, Classical composers were
influenced by the form with, for example, Igor Stravinsky's solo
piano work Piano-Rag-Music from
1919, and Claude Debussy's
Golliwogg's Cakewalk (from the 1908 Piano Suite Children's Corner),
and General Lavine (from his Preludes).[11]
Stravinsky also included a ragtime in his theater piece L'histoire du
soldat (1918).

List of ragtime
composers

[edit]
Samples

Download
recording — "The Wagon" ragtime from the Library of Congress' Gordon
Collection; an early ragtime song sung by Ben Harney in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania on about September 9, 1925

[edit]
References

^
Perlman, Itzhak. "THE EASY WINNERS and other rag-time music of Scott
Joplin". http://jazzbluesclub.com/uploads/posts/thumbs/1238134246_coversm.jpg. Retrieved 2010-04-26.

^ a
b
c
d
Berlin, Edward. "Ragtime". The Grove Music Dictionary. Oxford
University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/22825?q=Ragtime&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit. Retrieved 2009-06-29.

^ Rudi
Blesh, Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, Introduction to Scott
Joplin Complete Piano Works, New York Public Library, 1981, page xvii

^ Hugh Brogan,
The Penguin History of the USA, 2nd Edition, 1999, ISBN
978-0-14-025255-2, page 415.

^ a
b
Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, pp. xv-xvi.

^
Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, p. xiii

^
Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, p. xviii

^
Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, p. xxiii.

^ a
b
Past Winner Database, "1971 14th Grammy Awards." Accessed
Feb. 19, 2007.

^ H. Wiley
Hitchcock, "Stereo Review", 1971, page 84, cited in Scott Joplin:
Black-American Classicist, p. xiv.

^ a
b
Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, p. xiii.

^ a
b
van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of
Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN
0-19-316121-4, p.63

^ Loring
White, Ragging It: Getting Ragtime into History (and Some History into
Ragtime) iUniverse, 2005. xiv, 419 pp. ISBN
0-595-34042-3, page 99

^
Ragging It, page 100

^ Dvorak to
Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American
Roots by Maurice Peress, Oxford
University Press, 2003, page 39.

^ Bastin,
Bruce. "Truckin' My Blues Away: East Coast Piedmont Styles." in Nothing But
the Blues: The Music and the Musicians. Ed. Lawrence Cohn. New York:
Abbeville Press, 1993.

^
Scott, William B., and Rutkoff, Peter M. New York Modern: The Arts and the
City Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (2001), p37

^ a
b
Peterson, Bernard L. (1993). A century of musicals in black and white. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 357. ISBN 0-313-26657-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=VQggZdq1hawC&pg=PA357&lpg=PA357. Retrieved 2009-03-20.

^
"Classical Net". http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/joplin.html. Retrieved 2009-03-20.

^ "School of
Ragtime" (1908) in Scott Joplin Collected Piano Works, Edited by Vera
Brodsky Lawrence, The New York Public Library, 1971, ISBN
0-87104-242-8, page 284.

^ Jasen, David
A, Discography of 78 rpm Records of Joplin Works, Scott Joplin Complete
Piano Works, New York Public Library, (1981), pp.319-320

^
Ping-Robbins, Nancy R. (1998). Scott Joplin: a guide to research. p. 289. ISBN 0-8240-8399-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=0FeXfmHEXfIC&pg=PA289&lpg=PA289. Retrieved 2009-03-20.

^
"Entertainment Awards Database - LA Times". The Los
Angeles Times. http://theenvelope.latimes.com/factsheets/awardsdb/env-awards-db-search,0,7169155.htmlstory?target=article&searchtype=all&Query=. Retrieved 2009-03-14.

^ "Charis Music Group, compilation of cue sheets from the American
Top 40 radio Show". http://www.charismusicgroup.com/Cue%20Sheets/05-18-74.pdf. Retrieved 2009-09-05.

^
Specifically, the composer whose worldwide reputation rested exclusively on
ragtime works. Certain famous composers such as Irving Berlin and Claude Debussy dabbled
in the genre of ragtime but largely made their reputations in other
repertoires.

[edit]
Further reading

Berlin, E.A. (1980). Ragtime: a musical and
cultural history. University of California Press.

Blesh, R., and Janis, H. (1971). They all
played ragtime, 4th ed.. Oak Publications.

Jasen, D.A., and Tichenor, T.J. (1980).
Rags and ragtime. Dover.

Schafer, W.J., and Riedel, J. (1973). The
art of ragtime: form and meaning of an original black American art.
Louisiana State University Press.

Waldo, Terry. (2009). This is Ragtime.
Jazz at Lincoln Center Library Editions.

[edit]
External links

Look up ragtime in Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ragtime

Wikiquote has a
collection of quotations related to: Ragtime

Origins of Rag

Rag time Blog

Interview with Ragtime Pianist and Historian Max Morath on
AdventuresInMusic.biz, 2005

"Perfessor" Bill Edwards' Ragtime/Old-time Piano Gallery

Swedish Ragtime Home Page

The late John Roache's MIDI ragtime library

Ragtime
history in France

Rocky Mountain Ragtime Radio

Elite Syncopations Radio

Aussie
Dixieland/Ragtime Radio

Classic Ragtime Piano by Ted Tjaden

Warren Trachtman's Ragtime MIDI Website

Ragtime
Guitar Arrangements

Rag's
Rag - Free Ragtime Music And Scores

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime"

Categories: Ragtime | African
American music

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