Ragtime
Ragtime pieces (often called "rags") are typically composed for and performed on piano, though the genre has been adapted for a variety of instruments and styles.
Ragtime influenced early jazz,[3] Harlem stride piano, Piedmont blues, and European classical composers such as Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky.
Despite being overshadowed by jazz in the 1920s, ragtime has experienced several revivals, notably in the 1950s and 1970s (the latter renaissance due in large part to the use of "The Entertainer" in the film The Sting).
[4] The first recorded use of the term ragtime was by vaudeville musician Ben Harney who in 1896 used it to describe the piano music he played (which he had extracted from banjo and fiddle players).
[4] While its precise origins are unknown, scholars like Terry Waldo believe it to stem from music played by plantation slaves for dance events called “rags” (these were mentioned in newspaper articles as early as the 1820s).
[4] While its year of composition is unknown, Eubie Blake (who Pickett taught it to around 1900), believed it to have been written some time before the American Civil War.
[4] Jesse Pickett performed The Dream Rag at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the greater American public were first introduced to what would become known as ragtime.
[further explanation needed][5] The composed ragtime of the 1890s had its origins in African American communities of the Mississippi Valley in general and St. Louis in particular.
[12][13] For at least 12 years after its publication, "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, chord progressions or metric patterns.
[14] In a 1913 interview published in the black newspaper New York Age, Scott Joplin asserted that there had been "ragtime music in America ever since the Negro race has been here, but the white people took no notice of it until about twenty years ago [in the 1890s].
Dance orchestras started evolving away from ragtime towards the big band sounds that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s when they adopted smoother rhythmic styles.
It won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Top Classical Album of 1974 by Billboard magazine.
Ragtime – with Joplin's work at the forefront – has been cited as an American equivalent of the minuets of Mozart, the mazurkas of Chopin, or the waltzes of Brahms.
[26][27] 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.
The following year he released another composition called "All Coons Look Alike to Me", which eventually sold a million copies.
[28] Tom Fletcher, a vaudeville entertainer and the author of 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, has stated that "Hogan was the first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians.
In Hogan's later years, he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal" from the song, while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.
In 1899, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" was published and became a great hit and demonstrated more depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime.
But sheet music sales ultimately depended on the skill of amateur pianists, which limited classical ragtime's complexity and proliferation.
"[32] 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.
[35] The rag was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music.
The defining characteristic of ragtime music is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents occur between metrical beats.
He later returned to the style with two preludes for piano: Minstrels, (1910) and General Lavine-excentric (from his 1913 Préludes),[24] which was inspired by a Médrano circus clown.
Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and the other members of Les Six in Paris never made any secret of their sympathy for ragtime, which is sometimes evident in their works.
In 1902 the American cakewalk was very popular in Paris and Satie two years later wrote two rags, La Diva de l'empire and Piccadilly.
Igor Stravinsky wrote a solo piano work called Piano-Rag-Music in 1919 and also included a rag in his theater piece L'Histoire du soldat (1918).
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.
[34][43] Next came the release and Grammy Award for The New England Ragtime Ensemble's recording of The Red Back Book, Joplin tunes edited by Gunther Schuller.
Finally, with the release of the film The Sting in 1973, which had a Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack of Joplin rags, ragtime was brought to a wide audience.
Hamlisch's rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer" won an Academy Award,[44] and was an American Top 40 hit in 1974, reaching No.
