Word: protojazz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever an American composer was worthy of such thorough examination, surely Joplin is. His great accomplishment was to refine and perfect a kind of protojazz called ragtime. He did not invent it: black musicians along the Mississippi had long been syncopating, or "ragging," the rhythm of such forms as the march and the two-step, and Joplin was not even the first to publish a rag. But in his hands the nascent genre was quickly transformed into something worthy of the concert hall. Joplin's rags, beginning with the sprightly Original Rags and ending with the autumnal, resigned Magnetic...
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