Respecting
Mr. Joplin
"A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has
inundated the land. Nothing but ragtime prevails,
and the cakewalk with its obscene posturings, its
lewd gestures...Our children, our young men and
women are continually exposed to the contiguity, to
the monotonous attrition of this vulgarizing music.
It is artistically and morally depressing, and
should be suppressed by press and
pulpit."
--Musical Courier, September 13, 1899
That ragtime was rubbish, hardly
anyone of eminence disputed. That it was
intoxicating was nearly everyone's guilty secret,
causing a ragtime fad in America like no one had
ever seen. No amount of moralistic crusading could
stop it....keeping it in its
place, that was a different matter.
Its
place was generally agreed to be among the lowlife
and the seedy, and that is where it flourished: in
bars, in brothels, in the entertainment districts
of great cities, and, of course, among the social
outcasts of society. Americans of more
noble-minded persuasion knew who they
were.
What bothered
"respectable" America the most about ragtime may
have been its infectious rhythm. Any number of
religious societies that dotted the landscape in
19th century America seemed to have as one of their
chief tenets a rejection of the dance, or anything
that resembled it: music that got the toes tapping
and the body jiggling was thought to be much too
worldly, too physical, too....sinful. But it need
not have been the music itself that got ragtime its
contemptible reputation. The chief proponents of
early ragtime had the misfortune of being poor,
wanderers, and black.
Many Americans
alive in 1899 had grown up on Minstrel shows,
productions which featured white men whose faces
were smeared with burnt cork to appear black,
singing simple, good-natured songs and indulging in
slapstick comedy. One message was clear: black folks
weren't to be taken seriously. When they did
occasionally appear on the stage, in their own
Minstrel shows, it was evident that they could only
appear in light-hearted comedic roles. Love scenes
between negroes were unthinkable, unless down in a
highly comic manner. A black man attempting to
appear in a serious role would have caused a riot.
Given that most
of the more prestigious venues were closed to
blacks, it is natural that they would have made
their music in the only place in society then open
to them: the bottom. But this only strengthened the
perception that ragtime was a dirty music, because
it was associated with a host of sinful behaviors.
Many of the early ragtime "professors" were actually
hired as accompaniment to various goings-on in
houses of ill repute.
Into this
depressing climate strode a young man named Scott
Joplin. That very year, his "Maple Leaf Rag" had
been published, and it would soon rise to the top of
the charts (if they'd had "charts" in those days),
becoming a national hit, and making its composer
famous. But Joplin had something other than fame on
his mind. He was a serious composer, and he wanted
to make ragtime an art.
Joplin managed
to avoid the bawdy houses, for the most part, and
did not associate freely with other ragtime
pianists, as so many of the wandering minstrels of
the new style did, roaming from town to town and
sharing their styles communally from dusk till dawn
in whatever house of entertainment they found
themselves. He was a quiet man, and he earned his
living mainly by teaching in his home, and living
off the royalties he had managed to acquire in a
deal with an unusually generous (or at least
non-exploitive) publisher. When he discovered talent
in other men, he was quick to recommend them to his
own publisher. That he was able to recognize real
talent is obvious in that two of the men he helped
became, at least among ragtime aficionados, second
in fame only to his own, and are remembered to
posterity. He had fewer friends, but forged deeper
bonds.
Joplin was not
content to publish piano rags year after year in a
repetitive fashion. There is a good deal of variety
in those works--styles he tried to emulate, to
translate into his own language--but they do not
form his entire output, because the man was too
ambitious not to seek further. He looked toward the
art world, with its massive symphonies and towering
concertos, and he thought he would enter that world.
More than anything, he wanted to write an opera.
An opera for a
ragtime composer is a curious thing, until we
discover the roots of his passion in an episode of
his early life, one of many that we know so little
about. It is not idle fancy to speculate that it was
the influence of an early teacher that pushed him in
the direction of opera. The man was a German who
loved the classics, and would expound to young
Joplin the greatness of Bach, of Chopin, of the
great opera composers Mozart and Verdi, Bellini and
Donizetti. That this man, an early advocate
for Joplin of the highest ideals in art was also a
friendly and kind influence on the boy must have
stoked a fire that convinced him that he must do the
same for his art--not that he must forsake the
"gutter" of ragtime, but that he must turn it into
something expressing the highest aspirations of
humanity.
Writing an opera is one thing.
Getting it published and performed is another.
Joplin's publisher, the indefatigable champion of
great ragtime, and a strong supporter in the white
world, balked at the notion of publishing an entire
opera. Too costly, he warned. The two men parted
company as a result. But soon he would find that
there weren't many others who shared his vision
either. A single performance, without scenery
or costumes or full orchestra, to which he invited
potential patrons in the hopes that it would secure
needed financial backing for the project, was
the opera's only performance. The opera was called
"A Guest of Honor" and it no longer survives, though
there are many rumors concerning its fate.
Great
as the disappointment was, it did not stop
Joplin from attempting another opera, though
this too was to remain unpublished and
unperformed in the composer's lifetime. The
story concerns a young girl named Treemonisha,
who delivers her people from the ignorance of
superstition. The wondrous effects of education
had been one of Joplin's convictions from the
beginning. As a teacher, Joplin published a
"school of ragtime" to instruct would-be players
of his music in the fine art of the rag.
In his
quest to restore dignity to ragtime, Joplin's
attitude was actually very similar to that of
Schumann or Brahms*: he
deplored gallons of notes that signified empty
display. While many ragtimers were trying to outdo
one another in speed and fantastic execution,
Joplin argued for a more stately tempo. From the
middle of his output onwards, each of his rags
comes with an instruction from the composer in a
little box at the top of the page: "Ragtime must
be played slowly. It is never right to play
ragtime fast." How slowly is a good question;
doubtless this instruction has been abused by
overindulgence. In Joplin's world, anything
short of a lively presto was probably considered
"slow".
As many black
men of his era found, however, the quest for
personal and artistic dignity in the white world was
simply an impossible one. Joplin's obsessive
need to get someone to stage his opera drove him
near the edge of insanity; then he succumbed.
He died in a mental hospital in 1917, the same day
the United States entered the First World War.
Joplin's "Treemonisha" has since been
recorded and is occasionally performed. For an
exhaustive (and exhausting) account of the era, see
Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis's "They All Played
Ragtime," Oak Publications, New York, N.Y., 1966.
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