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Ragtime – also spelled rag-time or rag time – is a musical genre that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1895 and 1918. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated, or "ragged", rhythm.〔 The genre has its origins in the red light districts of African-American communities in St. Louis years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. Ernest Hogan (1865–1909) was a pioneer of ragtime music and the first to publish in the musical genre. He is also credited for coining the term ''ragtime''. Ben Harney, a white Kentucky native has often been credited for introducing the music to the mainstream public. His ragtime compositions helped popularize the genre throughout America.〔Blesh, Rudi. ''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist, Introduction to Scott Joplin Complete Piano Works'', New York Public Library, 1981, p. xvii.〕〔Brogan, Hugh. ''The Penguin History of the USA'', 2nd Edition, 1999, ISBN 978-0-14-025255-2, p.415.〕 Ragtime was also a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music.〔''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', pp. xv–xvi.〕 The ragtime composer Scott Joplin (''ca.'' 1868–1917) became famous through the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) and a string of ragtime hits such as "The Entertainer" (1902), although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s.〔''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', p. xiii〕〔''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', p. xviii〕 For at least 12 years after its publication, "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric patterns.〔''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', p. xxiii.〕 Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s, many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 rpm records. A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin brought out a compilation of Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy Award.〔(Past Winner Database ), "1971 14th Grammy Awards." Accessed Feb. 19, 2007.〕 In 1973 The New England Ragtime Ensemble (then a student group called The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble) recorded ''The Red Back Book'', a compilation of some of Joplin's rags in period orchestrations edited by conservatory president Gunther Schuller. This also won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named ''Billboards Top Classical Album of 1974. Subsequently, the motion picture ''The Sting'' (1973) brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. The film's rendering of "The Entertainer", adapted and orchestrated by Marvin Hamlisch, was a Top 5 hit in 1974. Ragtime – with Joplin's work at the forefront – has been cited as an American equivalent of the minuets of Mozart, the mazurkas of Chopin, or the waltzes of Brahms.〔Hitchcock, H. Wiley. "Stereo Review", 1971, p.84, cited in ''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', p. xiv.〕 Ragtime also influenced classical composers including Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.〔''Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist'', p. xiii.〕 ==Historical context== Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century and descended from the jigs and march music played by African American bands, referred to as "jig piano" or "piano thumping".〔van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of nineteenth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-316121-4, p.63〕 By the start of the 20th century, it became widely popular throughout North America and was listened and danced to, performed, and written by people of many different subcultures. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa. Some early piano rags are entitled marches, and "jig" and "rag" were used interchangeably in the mid-1890s.〔 Ragtime was also preceded by its close relative the cakewalk. In 1895, black entertainer Ernest Hogan published two of the earliest sheet music rags, one of which ("All Coons Look Alike to Me") eventually sold a million copies.〔White, Loring. ''Ragging It: Getting Ragtime into History (and Some History into Ragtime)'', iUniverse, 2005. xiv, 419 pp. ISBN 0-595-34042-3, p.99.〕 As fellow black musician Tom Fletcher said, Hogan was the "first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians."〔''Ragging It'', p.100.〕 While the song's success helped introduce the country to ragtime rhythms, its use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as "coon songs" because of their use of racist and stereotypical images of blacks. In Hogan's later years he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal" for the song while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.〔''Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots'' by Maurice Peress, Oxford University Press, 2003, p.39.〕 The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. In 1899, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" was published and became a great hit and demonstrated more depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime. Ragtime was one of the main influences on the early development of jazz (along with the blues). Some artists, such as Jelly Roll Morton, were present and performed both ragtime and jazz styles during the period the two genres overlapped. He also incorporated the Spanish Tinge in his performances, which gave a habanera or tango rhythm to his music.〔Garrett 2004, p. 94.〕 Jazz largely surpassed ragtime in mainstream popularity in the early 1920s, although ragtime compositions continue to be written up to the present, and periodic revivals of popular interest in ragtime occurred in the 1950s and the 1970s. The heyday of ragtime occurred before sound recording was widely available. Like classical music, and unlike jazz, classical ragtime had and has primarily a written tradition, being distributed in sheet music rather than through recordings or by imitation of live performances. Ragtime music was also distributed via piano rolls for player pianos. A folk ragtime tradition also existed before and during the period of classical ragtime (a designation largely created by Scott Joplin's publisher John Stillwell Stark), manifesting itself mostly through string bands, banjo and mandolin clubs (which experienced a burst of popularity during the early 20th century) and the like. A form known as novelty piano (or novelty ragtime) emerged as the traditional rag was fading in popularity. Where traditional ragtime depended on amateur pianists and sheet music sales, the novelty rag took advantage of new advances in piano-roll technology and the phonograph record to permit a more complex, pyrotechnic, performance-oriented style of rag to be heard. Chief among the novelty rag composers is Zez Confrey, whose "Kitten on the Keys" popularized the style in 1921. Ragtime also served as the roots for stride piano, a more improvisational piano style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Elements of ragtime found their way into much of the American popular music of the early 20th century. It also played a central role in the development of the musical style later referred to as Piedmont blues; indeed, much of the music played by such artists of the genre as Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, Elizabeth Cotten, and Etta Baker could be referred to as "ragtime guitar."〔Bastin, Bruce. "Truckin' My Blues Away: East Coast Piedmont Styles" in ''Nothing But the Blues: The Music and the Musicians''. Ed. Lawrence Cohn. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993.〕 Although most ragtime was composed for piano, transcriptions for other instruments and ensembles are common, notably including Gunther Schuller's arrangements of Joplin's rags. Ragtime guitar continued to be popular into the 1930s, usually in the form of songs accompanied by skilled guitar work. Numerous records emanated from several labels, performed by Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Lemon Jefferson, and others. Occasionally ragtime was scored for ensembles (particularly dance bands and brass bands) similar to those of James Reese Europe, or as songs like those written by Irving Berlin. Joplin had long-standing ambitions of synthesizing the worlds of ragtime and opera, to which end the opera ''Treemonisha'' was written. However its first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the piano, was "disastrous" and it was never to be fully performed again in Joplin's lifetime.〔Scott, William B., and Rutkoff, Peter M. ''New York Modern: The Arts and the City'' Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (2001), p37〕 In fact the score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, and a fully orchestrated and staged performance took place in 1972. An earlier opera by Joplin, ''A Guest of Honor'', has been lost.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Classical Net )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ragtime」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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