His quiet, level temperament became unpredictable, his behavior tense, suspicious, increasingly moody. Changes in his personality had already begun to disturb his wife and friends. The disaster of Treemonisha dealt a mortal blow to the composer’s spirit. 5 According to Rifkin, Joplin’s will was broken when he could find neither publisher nor producer for the opera: Rifkin too makes much of the opposition to ragtime, particularly to the problems Joplin encountered in trying to arrange production of his opera Treemonisha. The Valse Lente might and doubtless did, drive people to conjugal infidelity, but ragtime, I verily believe, drives them to mania. denotes a species of music almost invariably associated with particular dances of a lascivious or merely ridiculous kind. Nothing but ragtime prevails, and the cakewalk with its obscene posturing, its lewd gestures. There is some remarkably purple prose in those early reviews and, separated from us by sixty years, they make amusing reading:Ī wave of vulgar, filthy, suggestive music has inundated the land. Schafer and Johannes Riedel, for example, in their book The Art of Ragtime, 4 devote much space to quoting the unsympathetic and sometimes intemperate reviews of ragtime that appeared in music journals of the day. Its characteristic sound came from a combination of syncopation and steady beat: the left hand played a relentless bass pattern (what jazz musicians call a “boom-chick bass”), while the right hand played a syncopated melody, that is, one which started or ended off the beat.Īlthough in its own time this music was very successful with a large public, its present-day partisans seem to delight in emphasizing the difficulties that faced ragtime composers like Joplin and the other two leading composers of rags, James Scott and Joseph Lamb. By the turn of the century, the piano rag had developed into a highly stylized form, usually consisting of four themes, repeated one after another, with a reprise of the first theme after the second. From the minstrel song, they took the melodic style characteristic of banjo accompaniment from the march, they took the bass figures and rhythms from the cakewalk-a black dance that became a popular fad in the 1890’s-they took a mock-serious combination of stately procession and energetic improvisation. In any case, the style was created during the last years of the 19th century by itinerant black musicians of the Midwest out of a mixture of previously disparate elements.
It may be derived from the “ragged” melodic outlines of the music, or it could be a corruption of “jig-time,” or perhaps it came from the custom among blacks of putting out a white flag, which was called a rag, to announce that a party with music and dancing was about to begin. No one knows where the term “ragtime” came from. 2 And along with the recordings flowed a stream of books and articles, some scholarly, some popular, but all making large claims for the artistic importance of ragtime. With these now so easily available, ragtime recordings-on classical labels and featuring classically-trained musicians-inundated the market in versions not only for the piano, for which the music was originally written, but also for harpsichord, Moog synthesizer, violin, and band. The next major step in the revival was the publication of Joplin’s complete works by the New York Public Library. Rifkin, however, played the music exactly as written and observed the admonition, often printed on ragtime music, that “It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.” What emerged was a subtle and delicate music, with graceful melodies and compelling rhythms, which captivated a large new audience. Jazz musicians had altered the steady beat of the music, adding syncopations and in the process destroying the contrasts which highlighted the melodies Dixieland musicians had done the pieces very fast, damaging their lyrical qualities. But he played the music differently from the “flashy school of ragtime,” as he called it. Rifkin was not rediscovering forgotten or previously unrecorded material, for ragtime had remained popular with jazz and Dixieland audiences. 1 The record, which soon became a best-seller, was the idea of Joshua Rifkin, then a twenty-six-year-old pianist with degrees in composition from the Juilliard School of Music and in musicology from Princeton University. The revival began in 1970, when a recording of eight piano rags of Scott Joplin, the most important of the ragtime composers, appeared on the Nonesuch classical label. The renewed interest in ragtime, the American popular music of the first two decades of this century, among serious (or “classical”) musicians, is one of the most curious cases of changing musical taste in recent years.
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