Ragtime is essentially a late nineteenth- early twentieth- century American musical phenomenon that has influenced virtually every popular idiom in American music. Ragtime's unique syncopation has developed far beyond mere piano solos, and its range extends vividly and spectacularly from country blues to jazz, from white and black string-bands and novelty players to vaudeville and opera.
The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (1971) offers the following definition: "Ragtime is an early type of classical jazz, often for the piano, a rag being a piece of music in this idiom." A rather terse oversimplification, the definition hardly even suggests the breadth of the idiom, let alone the varied approaches that have emanated from the basic style.
The famed nonagenarian ragtime pianist and composer Eubie Blake offers a much broader definition. He feels that ragtime has once again become a popular mass music "because it had all the best things in music: rhythm, melody and syncopation." To this he adds, "Anything that is syncopated is basically ragtime. I don't care whether it's Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody or Tchaikovsky in his Waltz of Flowers." This from a man who has been an active ragtime pianist and composer since before the beginning of the twentieth century. David Jasen, an excellent contemporary ragtime scholar and pianist, is far more precise as well as more restrictive in his definitions of ragtime. In the introduction to his discography he states: "Ragtime is the syncopation of an entire melodic strain combined with a continuously even rhythm." Rudi Blesh, the foremost ragtime scholar extant, adds:
"Ragtime is mainly distinguished from most other music by its use of the rhythm loosely called syncopation. The really unique thing about ragtime when it appeared was the way the pianist opposed syncopation (or accents on the weak and normally unaccented second and third beats of the measure) in his right hand against a precise and regularly accented bass."
The purpose of presenting these definitions is to attempt to demonstrate that "ragtime" has been broadly interpreted, that the style, after its structured beginnings in the classic ragtime forms of Scott Joplin, has undergone a transformation since its inception and first peak of popularity.
For chronological and developmental purposes, it may be said that ragtime appeared as we know it today at the end of the nineteenth century. Ragtime developed from native American folk forms. It was fostered in bars and brothels where it was played on banjos and pianos. It was heard in the first movie theaters, through the piano accompaniments to silent motion pictures. It was performed and listened to on parlor pianos, player pianos, early phonographs, and Edison cylinder machines. It received wide distribution through large sheet-music sales. And it was as comfortable played by "professors" in houses of ill-repute as it was by families at home.
Maple Leaf Rag: Ragtime in Rural America
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