Ragtime
Entwurf eines Entstehungsschemas und einer musikalischen Entwicklungsgeschichte
The historical origins of Ragtime begin with its prototypes. These lie in the field of Afro-American folklore: "raggin" is the Black English term, from slavery times, for "tap dancing" and "soft shoe dancing". It is musically accompanied by foot stomping, hand clapping and body slapping. Fretless long necked lutes, one stringed fiddles and small drums also belong to the accompaniment of "raggin". Their music represents the Proto-Rag. The lutes were later misinterpreted as banjos, the fiddles were replaced by European violins. Around the middle of the last century, the guitar and mouth harp came into the possession of Afro-Americans. As "tappin, pattin, juba dancin" was forbidden outdoors and moved indoors, the Proto-Rag developed into the Country Rag.
Musically, the Country Rag consists of endlessly repeated, and at the same time variated, litany-like AA and AB forms. The adaption of melodic forms from the white master society started a further development. Instrumentation consisted of guitars, mouth harps, banjos, mandolins and fiddles. The Country Rag formula was first transferred to the piano, in the black populations' local entertainment spots, in the country and in the small towns. With that transference, the Piano Rag emerged.
The Piano Rag was picked up by white and black musicians and, through the adaption of European melodic structures, was passed along to a more sophisticated public. In this variation, Ragtime landed in the big cities. It became the Big City Rag there. It was subject to the same economic conditions as were Big City Blues and Big City Jazz: it served as entertainment, performed by professional musicians for the black and white establishment. Characteristic is its connection to the media: it successively ran into the sphere of the print media (Ragtime prints) as well as into the mechanical media (piano rolls, records). This phase represents "classical" Ragtime.
Parallel to this, the Country Rag landed, in the stream of domestic migration, by the black rural population, in the ghettos of mid-sized cities in the South, West and Eastern USA. The Urban Rag was produced by adapting to the needs of the black lower classes there. This Rag shows other musical and functional conditions than the Big City Rag. The Urban Rag provided ghetto tenants with immediate entertainment, never landed in the media-realm and extensively held its original-connection to dance. It was the music of the most important ghetto dances. As the Urban Rag, this music had a survival chance in the "notorious" quarters of all American cities, until it was finally absorbed by another black music, Jazz.
The Urban Rag lasted longest in the "notorious" quarter of New York, in Harlem. The Harlem Rag served the developing form of the stage musical and revue, as musical accompaniment, and as a consequence, landed in the province of "Tin Pan Alley". It was developed there into the last variation of the Rag genre, the Commercial Rag. Here the traditional Ragtime forms were discontinued, in favor of commercial song forms. The Ragtime hits from numbered catalogues of revues and musicals, certainly renewed the old reference to dance. Dancers, such as the duo Williams and Walker, and soloists, such as Jim Robinson, used the same rhythms for their taps and buck and wings, as former slaves had used for their raggin.
During the Great Depression this genre finally came to an end. In the train of the Oldtime Jazz Renaissance, in the forties, a Ragtime revival also occurred. Through this revival, Ragtime music became a historical musical style, which will live as long as there are music lovers for it.
Ragtime research originated during the Ragtime Renaissance. This research occurs on two levels: biographical-historiographical and musicological-analytical. Up until now, the bulk of work is of an anecdotal and biographical nature. Musicological research suffers from the one-sided observation that Ragtime is "European" music: sole results in relation to European musicology are produced. Ragtime must be analyzed as a black music, according to Afro-American research methods. With a new statement of the issue, it will be possible to come closer to the real Ragtime history.