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Ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that had its peak from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its Syncopation, syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott Joplin, James Scott (composer), James Scott, and Joseph Lamb (composer), Joseph Lamb. Ragtime pieces (often called "rags") are typically composed for and performed on piano, though the genre has been adapted for a variety of instruments and styles. Ragtime music originated within African Americans, African American communities in the late 19th century and became a distinctly American form of popular music. It is closely related to American march music, marches. Ragtime pieces usually contain several distinct themes, often arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Scott Joplin, known as the "King of Ragtime", gained fame through compositions like "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer (rag), The Entertainer". Ragtime influ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin (November 24, 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Dubbed the "King of Ragtime", he composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became the genre's first and most influential hit, later being recognized as the quintessential rag. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music meant to be played in concert halls and largely disdained the performance of ragtime as honky tonk music most common in saloons. Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Texas. During the late 1880s, he traveled the American South as a musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which helped make ragtime a national craze by 1897. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and worked as a piano teacher. He began publishing music in 1895, and his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame and a steady income. In 1901, Jopl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Lamb (composer)
Joseph Francis Lamb (December 6, 1887 – September 3, 1960) was an American composer of ragtime music. Lamb, of Irish American, Irish descent, was the only non-African American of the "Big Three" composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott (composer), James Scott. The ragtime of Joseph Lamb ranges from standard popular fare to complex and highly engaging. His use of long phrases was influenced by classical works he had learned from his sister and others while growing up, but his sense of structure was potentially derived from his study of Joplin's piano rags. By the time he added some polish to his later works in the 1950s, Lamb had mastered the classic rag genre in a way that almost no other composer was able to approach at that time, and continued to play it passably as well, as evidenced by at least two separate recordings done in his home, as well as a few recorded interviews. Early life and education Lamb was born in Montclair, New Je ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Harney
Benjamin Robertson Harney (March 6, 1872 – March 2, 1938) was an American songwriter, entertainer, and pioneer of ragtime, ragtime music. His 1895 composition "You've Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down" is known as the second ragtime composition to be published and the first ragtime hit to reach the mainstream. The first Ragtime composition published was La Pas Ma La written by Ernest Hogan in 1895. The copyright for "You've Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down" was registered in January 1895 (Greenup Music Cosource a few months prior to La Pas Ma La (September 1895, J. R. Belsource suggesting (contrary to popular belief) it was in fact the first of the two. During the early years of Harney's career, he falsely promoted himself as being the inventor of ragtime and never acknowledged the genre's black origin. Many contemporary musicians criticized him for it.Kleber, John E., editor. ''The Encyclopedia of Louisville''. University Press of Kentucky, 2001. p.369 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Scott (composer)
James Sylvester Scott (February 12, 1885 – August 30, 1938) was an American ragtime composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the "Big Three" composers of Classic rag, classical ragtime along with Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb (composer), Joseph Lamb.Jasen David A. and Trebor Jay Tichenor (1978) ''Rags and Ragtime'', Dover. Early life and education Scott was born in Neosho, Missouri, to James Scott Sr. and Molly Thomas Scott, both former slaves. In 1901, his family moved to Carthage, Missouri, where he attended Lincoln High School. He was given a piano after taking music lessons. In 1902, he began working at the music store of Charles L. Dumars, first washing windows, then demonstrating music at the piano as a song plugger, including his own pieces. Demand for his music convinced Dumars to print the first of Scott's published compositions, "A Summer Breeze - March and Two Step", in 1903. By 1904, two more compositions by Scott, "Fascinator March" and "On the Pike March" wer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maple Leaf Rag
The "Maple Leaf Rag" (copyright registered on September 18, 1899) is an early ragtime musical piece composed for piano by Scott Joplin. It was one of Joplin's early works, becoming the model for ragtime compositions by subsequent composers. It is one of the most famous of all ragtime pieces. Its success led to Joplin being dubbed the "King of Ragtime" by his contemporaries. The piece gave Joplin a steady if unspectacular income for the rest of his life. Despite ragtime's decline after Joplin's death in 1917, the "Maple Leaf Rag" continued to be recorded by many well-known artists. The ragtime revival of the 1970s brought it back to mainstream public notice once again. Background The "Maple Leaf Rag" is associated with the city of Sedalia, Missouri, although there is no record of Joplin having a permanent residence there before 1904. Joplin arrived in Sedalia in 1894 as a touring musician and stayed with the family of Arthur Marshall, who later became one of Joplin's stude ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cakewalk
The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". It was originally a processional partner dance performed with comical formality, and may have developed as a subtle mockery of the mannered dances of white slaveholders. Following an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. At that point, Broadway shows featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very popular across the country.. The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stride (music)
Stride jazz piano, often shortened to stride, is a jazz piano style that arose from ragtime players. Prominent stride pianists include James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Luckey Roberts, and Mary Lou Williams. Technique Stride employed left hand techniques from ragtime, wider use of the piano's range, and quick tempos. Compositions were written but were also intended to be improvised. The term "stride" comes from the idea of the pianist's left hand leaping, or "striding", across the piano. The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note (or an octave, major seventh, minor seventh or major tenth interval) on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Compared to the ragtime style popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands travel greater distances on the keyboard. Stride p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classic Rag
Classic rag (short for classical ragtime) is the style of ragtime composition pioneered by Scott Joplin and the Missouri school of ragtime composers. These compositions were first considered "classic" by Joplin's publisher, John Stark, as a way to distinguish them from what he considered the "common" rags of other publishers. Today, any composition fitting this particular ragtime structural form is considered classic rag. In the earliest days of ragtime, there was little consensus on how to print the syncopated melodies of ragtime, so there was considerable variety in the formatting of sheet music. Pieces appeared in common meter, in 4/4 time, and in 2/4 time, and often followed conventions of earlier musical forms such as the march. As the 20th century dawned, most composers, arrangers, and publishers began to settle on a common set of notational and structural conventions, and because Scott Joplin was the best-selling ragtime composer in that era, his conventions eventually pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stride Piano
Stride jazz piano, often shortened to stride, is a jazz piano style that arose from ragtime players. Prominent stride pianists include James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Luckey Roberts, and Mary Lou Williams. Technique Stride employed left hand techniques from ragtime, wider use of the piano's range, and quick tempos. Compositions were written but were also intended to be improvised. The term "stride" comes from the idea of the pianist's left hand leaping, or "striding", across the piano. The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note (or an octave, major seventh, minor seventh or major tenth interval) on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Compared to the ragtime style popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands travel greater distances on the keyboard ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Entertainer (rag)
"The Entertainer" is a 1902 Classic rag, classic piano rag written by Scott Joplin. It was sold first as sheet music by John Stillwell Stark, John Stark & Son of St. Louis, Missouri, and in the 1910s as piano rolls that would play on player pianos. The first recording was by blues and ragtime musicians the Prater & Hayes, Blue Boys in 1928, played on mandolin and guitar. As one of the classics of ragtime, it returned to international prominence as part of the ragtime revival in the 1970s, when it was used as the theme music for the 1973 Academy Awards, Oscar-winning film ''The Sting''. Composer and pianist Marvin Hamlisch's adaptation reached No. 3 on the ''Billboard (magazine), Billboard'' Billboard Hot 100, pop chart and spent a week at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary (chart), easy listening chart in 1974. The Recording Industry Association of America ranked it at No. 10 on its "Songs of the Century" list. Music "The Entertainer" is subtitled "A Rag Time Two-step (dance mov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano
A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a chromatic scale in equal temperament. A musician who specializes in piano is called a pianist. There are two main types of piano: the #Grand, grand piano and the #Upupright piano. The grand piano offers better sound and more precise key control, making it the preferred choice when space and budget allow. The grand piano is also considered a necessity in venues hosting skilled pianists. The upright piano is more commonly used because of its smaller size and lower cost. When a key is depressed, the strings inside are struck by felt-coated wooden hammers. The vibrations are transmitted through a Bridge (instrument), bridge to a Soundboard (music), soundboard that amplifies the sound by Coupling (physics), coupling the Sound, acoustic energy t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
