[3] When Joplin was learning the piano, serious musical circles condemned ragtime because of its association with the vulgar and inane songs of Tin Pan Alley.
[4] As a composer, Joplin refined ragtime, developing it from the dance music played by pianists in brothels in cities like St.
[5] This new art form, the classic rag, combined Afro-American folk music's syncopation and nineteenth-century European romanticism, with its harmonic schemes and its march-like tempos, in particular the works of John Philip Sousa.
[9] Joplin wrote his rags as "classical" music to raise ragtime above its "cheap bordello" origins and produced work which opera historian Elise Kirk described as "...more tuneful, contrapuntal, infectious, and harmonically colorful than any others of his era.
For the editor of the collected works this reveals publishers' "editorial casualness" as well as a view that dance-steps in the genre could be interchangeable.
Joplin in 1912
Scott Joplin - The Great Crush Collision March (1896)
