Word: rags
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...enough that the sheet music of Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold more than a million copies and made the son of a former slave well-to-do almost overnight. Not for Scott Joplin. As a youth he may have earned his living playing honky-tonk piano by night in a string of saloons and bordellos in the South and Midwest. But what few realized was that he was expertly tutored in harmony, counterpoint and the works of the classical masters...
Schuller in his book Early Jazz, the first volume of his The History of Jazz, makes a convincing case for the European march as a source of the rag. A typical Joplin rag has a disciplined arrangement of repeats and returns not unlike that of the march, and a similar duple tune signature. Jazz probably got its start, Schuller believes, when saloon pianists who could not read music began improvising rags they had heard...
...music. The film The Sting made Joplin's The Entertainer a national hit. This year came the bestselling novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (TIME, July 14); a central figure is the black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. As Walker sits down to play Joplin's Wall Street Rag, Doctorow writes: "Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music." Scott Joplin would have liked that...
...later the Roosevelt passed an incoming vessel packed to the railings with immigrants. Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly floundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky had turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs...
Offstage, she is a piquant rag doll with huge blue eyes fringed with black lashes. Her face reflects the determination to survive in a profession that allows no respite: "If I miss one day of dancing, I can feel it." At age 15, after she had entered George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, Gelsey developed tendinitis. By the time Mr. B. selected her to dance in Firebird two years later, dancing had become unbearably painful. "I had forced a great deal." She almost gave up. Instead, in an effort comparable to Rubinstein's retraining himself...