Ragtime

A march bass holds a syncopated right hand, and piano dance music becomes a puzzle of displaced accents.

Related

ModernSyncopationPiano

Ragtime took shape in the American Midwest in the 1890s. It keeps a dance bass in place while moving the accents of the melody, usually at the piano.

Origins and era

Its parents are the cakewalk, the march and the polka. In the 1890s black pianists in St. Louis and Sedalia set the left hand to a two-beat bass and displaced the melodic accents. Sheet music flourished around 1897; Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag became a bestseller in 1899 and carried ragtime into parlours and dance halls.

What you hear

Listen to the left hand first, bass on the strong beats and chords on the weak ones, like a march. Then the right hand, where accents land off the beat, short phrases repeat, and chromatic neighbours curl back. Strains usually run sixteen bars in an AABBACCDD plan, with a trio in the subdominant or minor.

Key figures

Scott Joplin made ragtime publishable art music; Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer and Solace are all in the library. James Scott and Joseph Lamb extended its harmony and left-hand leaps. Euday Bowman's Twelfth Street Rag carried the idiom into the 1910s.

Lineage

Cakewalk, march and banjo syncopation feed in; stride piano, novelty piano and early jazz come out. Debussy and Stravinsky also borrowed its rhythm.

Common misunderstandings

Ragtime is not improvised jazz; it is written piano music first. It does not belong to the piano alone, since banjo, brass bands and player pianos played it too. Playing it uniformly fast erases the displacement between bass and melody.

Sources

• Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime, A Musical and Cultural History（University of California Press, 1980），用于核对年代与体裁特征
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Ragtime，用于核对人物与作品

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.