Ragtime And Popular Music

What ragtime is not is hokey music played on out-of-tune pianos in smoky bars full of drunks singing off key

. It is also not silent movie background music. Sure, it has been used in these contexts, but it is much different and much more.

It is the beginning of popular music in the world as we know it today. Picture a musical funnel, if you will. On the upper end are Western classical music forms of the 18th and 19th centuries, including sonatas, gavottes, waltzes, even some symphony and opera.

Coming from Eastern Europe you have marches and mazurkas. From Spain and South America come the Latin-tinged influences, many of which actually correspond directly to African rhythms, including the famous habaera. To spice things up throw in the Negro call and response spirituals of the American south, and the European-based folk songs of the Eastern US.

All of these forms mix into the mouth of this funnel to create a hybrid - the march form with the classical development and Afro/Latin-rhythms with folk melodies that are syncopated. That was the basic origin of ragtime in the 1890s. It was the first music truly indigenous to the United States. By 1905, at least in the US, almost all music written here had something to do with ragtime. Even the intermezzos and waltzes were syncopated to a degree.

Now picture a string next to the funnel. That is a form that co-developed with ragtime and mixed in with it, yet remained on its own. The name of this form is the blues, a unique 12-bar development (sometimes 8 or 16) that permeated ragtime, and even the verses of many ragtime songs

Frankie and Johnnie, although it is ragtime, is also a blues number. Spewing out of this funnel you have forms that comprise most popular music in the Western world today. Ragtime is the direct ancestor of ... Country music and bluegrass (ragtime guitar picking), jazz (improvised ragtime and blues), popular song (syncopated pieces that started in the early 1900s), swing (blues again), rock and roll (again blues with syncopation), and rap.

by: John Cooper.

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