American culture
Ragtime
Ragtime is an American musical genre, enjoying its peak popularity around the years 1900–1918. Ragtime is a dance form written in 2/4 or 4/4 time, and utilizing a walking bass, that is, the bass note played legato on the 1-3 beats with a staccato chord played on the 2-4 beats. Much ragtime is written in Sonata form, with four distinct themes and a modified first theme appearing in the work. Ragtime music is syncopated, with the melodic notes landing largely on the off-beats.
The etymology of the word ragtime is not known with certainty. One theory is that the "ragged time" associated with the walking bass set against the melodic line gives the genre its name.
Styles of Ragtime
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 fox trot.
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).
The terms below should not be considered exact, but merely an attempt to pin down the general meaning of the concept.
- Cakewalk - A pre-ragtime dance form
popular until about 1904. The music is intended to be representative
of an African-American dance contest in which the prize is a cake.
Many early rags are cakewalks.
- Characteristic March - A pre-ragtime
dance form popular until about 1908. A march incorporating idiomatic
touches (such as syncopation) supposedly characteristic of the
race of their subject, which is usually African-Americans. Many
early rags are characteristic marches.
- Two-Step - A pre-ragtime dance form
popular until about 1911. A large number of rags are two-steps.
- Slow Drag - Another dance form associated
with early ragtime. A modest number of rags are slow drags.
- Coon Song - A pre-ragtime vocal
form popular until about 1901. A song with crude, racist lyrics
often sung by white performers in blackface. Gradually died out
in favor of the ragtime song. Strongly associated with ragtime
in its day, it is one of the things that gave ragtime a bad name.
- Ragtime Song - The vocal form of
ragtime, more generic in theme than the coon song. Though this
was the form of music most commonly considered "ragtime"
in its day, many people today prefer to put it in the "popular
music" category. Irving Berlin was a famous composer and
Gene Greene was a famous singer in this style.
- Folk Rag - A name often used to
describe ragtime that originated from small towns or assembled
from folk strains, or at least sounded as if they did. Folk rags
often have unusual chromatic features typical of composers with
non-standard training.
- Classic Rag - A name used to describe
the Missouri-style ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin,
and others.
- Fox-Trot - A dance fad which began
in 1913. Fox-trots contain a dotted-note rhythm different from
that of ragtime, but which nonetheless was incorporated into many
late rags.
- Novelty Piano - A piano composition
emphasizing speed and complexity which emerged after World War
I. It is almost exclusively the domain of white composers.
- Stride Piano - A style of piano which emerged after World War I, developed by and dominated by black East coast pianists. Together with novelty piano, it may be considered a successor to ragtime, but is not considered by all to be "genuine" ragtime.