An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 10 | THE RISE OF RAGTIME 241

Piano manufacturing in the United States, already

a healthy industry in the nineteenth century

(see chapter 6), entered its boom years around

1900 with the popularity of the player piano:

a mechanized “self-playing” instrument. The

mass-produced player pianos of the early 1900s

featured a pneumatic action, typically operated

mechanically with pedals. Holes in a perforated

paper roll acted as valves, allowing pressurized

air to activate keys in the proper sequence. Of

the 2.5 million player pianos sold in the United

States between 1900 and 1930, most had a simple

mechanism that produced an artifi cial-sounding

music. More expensive and thus less common

were “reproducing pianos,” which could capture at

least some of a pianist’s expressive gestures; their

Player Pianos and Piano Rolls

A CLOSER LOOK

variety of touch, dynamics, and pedaling could

create lifelike performances. Yet even the simpler

player pianos offered a home musical experience

more vivid than that of the early phonograph, and

player piano sales remained strong until the Great

Depression of the 1930s.

Just as the phonograph created a market for

records, the player piano created a demand for

piano rolls. Master rolls could be created either

from a pianist’s live performance or by plotting

the placement of holes visually and punching

them manually. Often the two methods were

combined: extra notes could be added to a

pianist’s performance after the fact, in a process

analogous to the editing techniques of the later

recording studio (see chapter 17).

Instead, the fourth strain comes as close to a songlike melody as any part of the

rag. It also returns to the opening key, a common feature in a Joplin rag that

never occurs in a Sousa march. Also standard in a rag but not in a march is a

return of the fi rst strain between the second and third strains. Compare the lay-

out of a typical rag to the short (regimental) march form (see chapter 7):

Accompanying Listening Guide 10.1 is a modern recording of a player piano

“reading” a piano roll cut by Joplin himself in 1916. Although rolls made for high-

end player pianos could reproduce a performer’s nuances of dynamics, touch,

and pedaling, the rolls made by Joplin lack those refi nements. Moreover, Joplin

made the rolls late in life, when his health was in decline, and they probably do

not represent his playing at its best. Nevertheless, this piano roll gives the listener

some idea of how Joplin wanted his music to be performed. It is worth noting,

considering Joplin’s written instructions to play his music exactly as notated, that

his performance departs from the printed sheet music in many small particulars.

Joplin left Sedalia in 1901 and traveled through the Midwest for several years.

In 1907 he settled in New York City, where he worked as a composer, arranger,

and teacher until his death in 1917. Tre e m o n i s h a, an opera for which Joplin wrote

his own libretto, occupied much of his energy in those years. The opera is set in

the Arkansas countryside near Texarkana—his childhood home. It centers on an

embodiment of the New Negro named Treemonisha, a young woman who hopes

to lead her community out of ignorance and superstition by teaching them the

Rag: introduction | A A BB A | CC DD

Short march: introduction | A A BB | (trans) CC DD

Treemonisha

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