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Ragtime is an American musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1899 and 1918. It has had several periods of revival since then and is still being composed today. Ragtime was the first truly American musical genre, predating Jazz ''King of Ragtime'' by Edward A. Berlin, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-19-510108-1, page vi.. It began as dance music in popular music settings years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. Being a modification of the then popular March , it was usually written in 2/4 or 4/4 Time (meter) 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. A composition in this style is called a "rag". A rag written in 3/4 time is a "ragtime waltz". Ragtime is not a "time" ( 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. According to the ''New Grove Dictionary of Jazz'' the musical form was originally called "ragged time" which later became corrupted to "ragtime". HISTORICAL CONTEXT Ragtime originated in African American Musical Communities , in the late 19th century, and descended from the Jig s and Marches played by all-black bands common in all Northern cities with black populations (van der Merwe 1989, p.63). 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-American syncopation and European classical music, though this description is oversimplified. '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 (ibid.) and ragtime was also preceded by its close relative the " 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.''Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots'' by Maurice Peress, Oxford University Press, 2003, page 39. 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. Some authorities consider ragtime to be a form of Classical Music . 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 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. 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. Occasionally ragtime was originally scored for ensembles (particularly dance bands and Brass Band s), or as songs. Joplin had long-standing ambitions for a synthesis of the worlds of ragtime and Opera , to which end the opera '' Treemonisha '' was written; but it was never performed in his lifetime. In fact the score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970; it has been performed in numerous productions since then. An earlier opera by Joplin, ''A Guest of Honor'', has been lost. STYLES OF RAGTIME 's "Dizzy Fingers", a 1923 Novelty Piano piece.]]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). Many ragtime pianists, Eubie Blake and Mark Birnbaum among them, include the songs and the later styles as ragtime. The terms below should not be considered exact, but merely an attempt to pin down the general meaning of the concept.
's 1904 "On the Pike", which refers to the midway of the St. Louis World's Fair Of 1904 .]] RAGTIME REVIVALS In the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 RPM Records . 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 keys 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 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 ''. Finally, with the release of the motion picture '' The Sting '' in 1974, 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'' was a top 40 hit in 1974. 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 , The Gallus Brothers and the not-quite as young Baby Gramps . RAGTIME COMPOSERS By far the most famous ragtime composer was Scott Joplin . Joseph Lamb and James Scott are, together with Joplin, acknowledged as the three most sophisticated ragtime composers. Some rank Artie Matthews as belonging with this distinguished company. Other notable ragtime composers included May Aufderheide , Eubie Blake , George Botsford , Zez Confrey , Ben Harney , Charles L. Johnson , Luckey Roberts , Paul Sarebresole , Wilber Sweatman , and Tom Turpin . Modern ragtime composers include William Bolcom , William Albright , David Thomas Roberts , Frank French , Trebor Tichenor , Mark Birnbaum and Reginald R. Robinson . QUOTATIONS "There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it. It is my opinion that the colored people of this country have done four things which refute the oft-advanced theory that they are an absolutely inferior race, which demonstrate that they have originality and artistic conception, and, what is more, the power of creating that which can influence and appeal universally. The first two of these are the Uncle Remus stories, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, and the Jubilee songs, to which the Fisk singers made the public and the skilled musicians of both America and Europe listen. The other two are ragtime music and the cake-walk. No one who has traveled can question the world-conquering influence of ragtime, and I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that in Europe the United States is popularly known better by ragtime than by anything else it has produced in a generation. In Paris they call it American music." '', 1912. SAMPLES
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