![]() 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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