A pianola, a type of instrument, can play specific pieces of music back in time. Music was not yet available to be recorded during ragtime music’s existence. In terms of ragtime, a musical sense of rhythm is extremely important, so a specific type of rhythm is required. It is difficult to compare and contrast Maple Leaf Rag, and any ragtime, classical, or contemporary music, on a linear scale.
Maple leaf rag how to#
The following is a step-by-step guide on how to play the Maple Leaf Rag. Playing the Maple Leaf Rag can be a fun and challenging experience for pianists of all levels. The Maple Leaf Rag is one of the most famous and well-known examples of Ragtime music. It is characterized by a syncopated, or “ragged,” rhythm. Ragtime is a style of music that was popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Maple Leaf Rag was published in 1899 and quickly become a best-seller, helping to establish Joplin as one of the most important composers of Ragtime music. And it was as comfortable played by "professors" in houses of ill-repute as it was by families at home.Scott Joplin‘s Maple Leaf Rag is one of the most popular and well-known piano pieces from the Ragtime era. It received wide distribution through large sheet-music sales. It was performed and listened to on parlor pianos, player pianos, early phonographs, and Edison cylinder machines.
Maple leaf rag movie#
It was heard in the first movie theaters, through the piano accompaniments to silent motion pictures. It was fostered in bars and brothels where it was played on banjos and pianos. Ragtime developed from native American folk forms. The purpose of presenting these definitions is to attempt to demonstrate that "ragtime" has been broadly interpreted, that the style, after its structured beginnings in the classic ragtime forms of Scott Joplin, has undergone a transformation since its inception and first peak of popularity.įor chronological and developmental purposes, it may be said that ragtime appeared as we know it today at the end of the nineteenth century. The really unique thing about ragtime when it appeared was the way the pianist opposed syncopation (or accents on the weak and normally unaccented second and third beats of the measure) in his right hand against a precise and regularly accented bass." "Ragtime is mainly distinguished from most other music by its use of the rhythm loosely called syncopation. In the introduction to his discography he states: "Ragtime is the syncopation of an entire melodic strain combined with a continuously even rhythm." Rudi Blesh, the foremost ragtime scholar extant, adds: David Jasen, an excellent contemporary ragtime scholar and pianist, is far more precise as well as more restrictive in his definitions of ragtime.
I don't care whether it's Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody or Tchaikovsky in his Waltz of Flowers." This from a man who has been an active ragtime pianist and composer since before the beginning of the twentieth century. He feels that ragtime has once again become a popular mass music "because it had all the best things in music: rhythm, melody and syncopation." To this he adds, "Anything that is syncopated is basically ragtime.
The famed nonagenarian ragtime pianist and composer Eubie Blake offers a much broader definition.
The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (1971) offers the following definition: "Ragtime is an early type of classical jazz, often for the piano, a rag being a piece of music in this idiom." A rather terse oversimplification, the definition hardly even suggests the breadth of the idiom, let alone the varied approaches that have emanated from the basic style. Ragtime's unique syncopation has developed far beyond mere piano solos, and its range extends vividly and spectacularly from country blues to jazz, from white and black string-bands and novelty players to vaudeville and opera. Ragtime is essentially a late nineteenth- early twentieth- century American musical phenomenon that has influenced virtually every popular idiom in American music.
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