Ragtime

Ragtime is a syncopated, written-out piano music that thrived between roughly 1895 and 1918 and prefigured jazz. The left hand keeps a steady oom-pah pattern — bass note on beats one and three, mid-register chord on beats two and four — while the right hand plays melodies whose accents fall deliberately off the beat, producing the form's characteristic limping or ragged feel. Tempos are moderate rather than fast; Joplin himself instructed performers in print not to play ragtime fast. Most pieces are in cut time (2/2) and follow the AABBACCDD form inherited from the march. Pieces were sold and consumed primarily as printed sheet music or piano rolls for player pianos rather than as live performance, since recording technology in the period was not optimised for piano.

Ragtime developed in the African American musical communities of the Midwest — Sedalia, Missouri; Saint Louis; Kansas City — in the 1890s, fusing African-derived syncopation with European march and dance forms. Scott Joplin (c. 1868–1917), trained as a classical pianist, published Maple Leaf Rag in 1899; it sold tens of thousands of copies in its first year and millions over the next decade, the first piano sheet music to do so. Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb and Tom Turpin formed the so-called classic ragtime circle. The form's popularity peaked around 1910 and was supplanted by early jazz and by tin pan alley song after World War I. A major revival came in the 1970s when Joshua Rifkin's recordings of Joplin's rags reached classical audiences and George Roy Hill's film The Sting (1973) used The Entertainer prominently on its soundtrack.

The fundamental sound is the offset between left and right hands. Track the left hand alone first — it should keep an unwavering oom-pah pattern. Then add the right hand, whose accents land between rather than on the beat. The march-derived AABBACCDD form means each strain (16 bars long) is played twice in succession, so the structure has a strong sense of progression and return. Joplin's later pieces — Solace (1909), Bethena (1905), Stoptime Rag (1910) — open up the basic rag idiom into waltz time, slow tango feel and other variants.

Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and The Entertainer (1902) are the canonical starting pieces. Solace (1909), a slow rag in habanera-tinged feel, shows the form's emotional range. Joshua Rifkin's 1970s Nonesuch recordings of Joplin established the contemporary interpretive standard; Joplin's own piano rolls survive and are widely available.

Scott Joplin spent the last decade of his life trying to mount his opera Treemonisha, which he could not get staged in his lifetime — he died in a New York mental institution in 1917 from complications of syphilis. Treemonisha was finally premiered in 1972 in Atlanta and Joplin was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1976.