CHAPTER 10 | THE RISE OF RAGTIME 239
Sedalia was a railroad hub with a thriving community at the center of the
region’s commerce and transportation. Sedalia was also full of travelers in
search of entertainment, and the city boasted two theaters as well as saloons and
dance halls. During his late twenties and early thirties, Joplin enrolled in music
courses at a local black college, played for dances, and worked for a time as a pia-
nist in two of Sedalia’s brothels. He also belonged to one of the city’s two black
social clubs, the Maple Leaf Club, to which he dedicated the Maple Leaf Rag (1899),
his most famous composition.
W hen in 1896 the fi rst syncopated songs were published under the “ragtime”
label, the style was already familiar to those who knew black folk tradition; but
for those who did not, ragtime brought the novelty of a fad. The next year, 1897,
saw the fi rst published instrumental rag, Mississippi Rag, by the white bandleader
W. H. Krell, and shortly after, the fi rst rag by an African American composer,
Tom Turpin’s Harlem Rag. Once ragtime numbers appeared in print, their impact
was quickly felt. By the end of the decade ragtime songs and instrumentals
were heard on the musical stage, in cylinder recordings and piano rolls, and in
arrangements for ensembles like Sousa’s band.
Ragtime is thought to have been named for the “ragged rhythm” whose
accents cut across the duple meter’s alternating strong and weak beats. But a
more recent theory holds that it was named, by its black practitioners, for the
hoisting of handkerchiefs (rags) to signal a dance. The term seemed demeaning
even to Scott Joplin, the declared “King of Ragtime.” In 1908, for example, he
wrote: “What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay.”
Joplin made this comment in the School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano, which
gave to anyone who mastered its notation the key to the music’s “weird and
intoxicating effect.” School of Ragtime explains syncopation as unusual groupings
of rapid notes against a slower, steady beat, demanding that every note “be played
as written.” In publishing his piano rags, Joplin was pursuing three related goals:
to give the music a salable form, to expand its range of customers, and to raise its
status. For as long as ragtime stayed in the oral tradition, those who mastered it
had only their skill as performers to sell.
Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag (LG 10.1), published in Sedalia in 1899, sold steadily
through the remainder of the composer’s lifetime and has afterward endured
in the piano repertory. Like other instrumental rags, the piece evolved from the
connection of syncopated rhythms to the form of the march. Maple Leaf Rag con-
tains four strains, each sixteen bars long, each repeated at least once, and with
the left hand providing a steady pulse for the right hand’s rhythmic trickiness.
The strict beat never fl ags, nor does the regular procession of square-cut phrases.
But the melodies, harmonies, and textures offer variety and surprise. Rags, like
marches, usually ease into the melody through an introduction, but the Maple Leaf
Rag plunges right into the fi rst strain. Likewise, piano ragtime is normally pro-
pelled by a left hand that alternates a low octave on the beat and a midrange chord
after it, like the “oom-pah” of a military band’s low brass. But here Joplin delays
that pattern until the second strain. Also unusual in the fi rst strain is the dynamic
plan: a loud beginning, a drop of volume, and a crescendo back to the level of the
start. The last six bars play on the lowered and raised third degree of the scale in
a blues-like fashion, in an age before the blues took formal shape (see chapter 11).
As in a march, the third strain of the Maple Leaf Rag is a trio that drops down
into the subdominant key, a fi fth lower than the tonic. Unlike marches and
many rags, however, the new key does not usher in a singing, cantabile melody.K Scott Joplin (1867–1917), the
King of Ragtime.LG 10.1School of Ragtime172028_10_231-253_r2_mr.indd 239 23/01/13 10:26 AM