The Ragtime Revolution
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Transcript of The Ragtime Revolution
Reynolds
Jean Reynolds
Professor Frank Burton
ENG 1102
3 August 2015
The Ragtime Revolution
In 1976 a Pulitzer Prize was posthumously awarded to an African-
American composer who had died in poverty in 1917 at the age of forty-
eight. That man was Scott Joplin, and the music he championed was called
ragtime. At the time of his death, ragtime was losing popularity, and for the
next forty years only a small number of enthusiasts kept performing his
music. But by the 1970s, Americans were rediscovering the “ragged
rhythms and lilting melodies” (Curtis 1) of ragtime, and an amazing revival
began. Music publishers sold huge numbers of ragtime recordings and
sheet music, and scholars began to take a closer look at ragtime and its role
in American music. Historians today point to the ragtime era (1895-1915) as
a turning point in American musical history. According to music scholars
William Schafer and Johannes Riedel, “Ragtime effected a total musical
revolution, the first great impact of black folk culture on the dominant white
middle-class culture of America” (xi).
Thanks to ragtime’s fusion of black rhythms and traditional European
musical forms, it became “the first distinctively American musical style”
(Smithsonian 227). The United States was still a young country, and both its
popular songs and serious musical compositions were based on European
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hymns, folk songs, and marches. But ragtime, with its complex African
rhythms and syncopated melodies, helped Americans make a dramatic
break from the music of the past. The “Maple Leaf Rag,” for example,
employs an African-American hexaotonic scale that would later be called
“the blues scale” and become a common feature of black music (Stewart
97).
Scott Joplin’s musical compositions prompted Americans to start
altering their assumptions about African-Americans. “One of ragtime’s
major contributions was to emphasize the black musician’s ability to
conceive and score a formalized instrumental music, quite an abstract form”
(Schafer 35). Although Joplin (1868-1917) is most remembered for his
bestselling piano compositions (called “rags”), he was a versatile and
accomplished musician who experimented with other musical forms. A
Joplin suite called The Ragtime Dance is still performed today, and Joplin
also composed two operas. Just before Joplin died, he announced that he
was working on a symphony (Berlin 238).
As the ragtime craze spread across the United States, ragtime became
embedded in American culture. Schafer and Riedel say that ragtime
“inspired a new direction in the American musical theater” (xi), and they
find a direct link between ragtime and “later developments in black music—
specifically jazz” (xii). Ragtime was heard everywhere: Alice Roosevelt,
daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, once interrupted a diplomatic
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reception at the White House to ask the Marine Band to play Joplin’s
“Maple Leaf Rag” (White 216).
Although ragtime traces its origins to African-American rhythms, it
brought black and white musicians together right from the beginning. The
first rag ever published was the “Mississippi Rag” composed by a white
musician, William Krell, in 1897. Scott Joplin got his start when white
businessman John Stark published Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Although few
black composers were paid royalties for their work in those days, Stark
agreed to pay Joplin for each copy sold. According to Edward Berlin, this
contract “gave him sufficient income to change the conditions and course of
his life” (56). Sales from this one piece of music enabled Joplin to “meet
most of his basic expenses” for life (58). John Stark also benefited from the
arrangement. Finding himself “the surprised owner of the hottest copyright
in ragtime” (Jasen 17), Stark expanded his publishing business and moved
from the small town of Sedalia, Missouri to St. Louis and then to New York
City.
White women were hugely important in the development of ragtime.
Five-and-dime stores promoted sales by hiring pianists to perform the latest
music in their stores. Often the music was ragtime and the performer was a
woman. Superstar Judy Garland was one of those pianists, and her
daughter Liza Minnelli portrayed one of those pianists in the film In the
Good Old Summertime (Luft 8). Even more important were the female
composers of ragtime. Max Morath, a white performer who did much to
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keep ragtime alive in the twentieth century, explained, “Ragtime was
’black,’ the ragtime women were white” (155). Irene Giblin was a talented
pianist who played ragtime in a department store in St. Louis and went on
to compose rags herself. A research study by Max Morath and John Edward
Hasse found that by 1930 at least 220 women had published at least one
rag or ragtime song (White 316).
The most famous black-white collaboration brought together Joseph
Lamb, a young white man who composed ragtime, and Scott Joplin. When
Joplin heard Lamb’s “Sensation Rag,” he persuaded John Stark to publish it
and encouraged Lamb to continue composing. According to Carol
Binkowski, Lamb’s biographer, “This was the beginning of a very cordial
friendship between Joe Lamb and Scott Joplin” (81). Lamb eventually
published twelve rags with James Stark, and he began composing again
during the ragtime revival that began in the 1950s.
Ragtime’s most important achievement was to turn America from a
musical follower into a world leader. The tables began to turn in 1892, when
Czech composer Antonin Dvorak moved to the United States. An avid
folklorist, he urged American composers to incorporate black musical ideas
into their compositions (Berlin 87). Soon a number of European musicians
began to find inspiration in the infectious rhythms of ragtime. Musical
innovators found in ragtime “an opportunity to explore a provocative
approach to matters of meter and rhythm quite foreign to their own cultural
experience” (Bomberger 84).
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The popularity of ragtime grew rapidly both in America and overseas.
John Philip Sousa first introduced European audiences to ragtime at the
Paris Exposition in 1900, where Sousa’s band won a prize for its rendition of
“My Ragtime Baby” by Fred Stone (Southern 319). Soon musicians overseas
began to recognize that ragtime was “a music of enduring worth,
revolutionary in concept and development” (Blesh 5).
As ragtime traveled across Europe, serious musicians began to
incorporate its rhythms into many of their compositions. “The quality of
ragtime is, of course, what attracted not only musicians like Debussy,
Stravinsky, Satie, Ives, and Sousa, but also millions of people here and
abroad” (Schuller 80). Schafer and Riedel also name Darius Milhaud, Paul
Hindemith, and Maurice Ravel as composers inspired by ragtime (xi).
More than 115 years have passed since Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”
captured the hearts of music lovers in America and around the world. Since
that time, racial barriers have continued to fall, and American jazz, pop
music, and musical theater have won worldwide renown. Although for a
time America seemed to forget about the role that ragtime played in its
history, that mistake has been corrected. Ragtime scholarship continues to
flourish, with new articles and books appearing all the time. H. Loring
White notes that there are at least six ragtime festivals every year, and
ragtime is also featured at many jazz festivals (2). New recordings appear
every year, and composers have begun to compose rags again. Joplin’s
opera Treemonisha has been performed in the United States, Italy, Finland,
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and Germany. According to Schaefer and Riedel, ragtime “will endure as
long as people have the sensibilities to understand its beauty and its
strength” (159).
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Works Cited
Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime. New York: Oxford U Press, 1994.
Binkowski, Carol J. Joseph F. Lamb: A Passion for Ragtime. Jefferson:
McFarland, 2012.
Blesh, Rudi and Harriet Janis. They All Played Ragtime. New York: Knopf,
1950.
Bomberger, E Douglas. “European Perceptions of Ragtime.” 83-97. Jazz and
the Germans. Ed. Michael J. Budds. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2002.
Curtis, Susan. Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune. Columbia: Missouri U Press,
1994.
Luft, Lorna. Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir. New York: Gallery,
1999.
Morath, Max. “”May Aufderheide and the Ragtime Women.” 154-165.
Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music. Ed. John Edward Hasse.
New York: Schirmer, 1985.
Jasen, David A. and Gene Jones. Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of
Ragtime and Early Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Schafer, William J. and Johannes Riedel. Art of Ragtime. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana U Press, 1973.
Schuller, Gunther. “Rags, the Classics, and Jazz.” Ragtime: Its History,
Composers, and Music. Ed. John Edward Hasse. New York: Schirmer,
1985. 79-89.
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Smithsonian Music: The Definitive Visual History. DK Publishing, 2013.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York:
Norton, 1997.
Stewart, Earl and Jane Duran. “Scott Joplin and the Quest for Identity.”
Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.2. (2007) : 94-99.
White, H. Loring. Ragging It. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2005.
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