Ragtime

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

In this brief paper I would like to illustrate the mutual influence of Classical and Jazz music through two
compositions written by American composers Scott
Joplin (1867/68 - 1917) and Gunther Schuller (1925
- 2015). While the first dedicated his whole life to
be considered a ”legitimate” composer of Western-
European Classical music, instead of a ”mere” Rag-
time player, the latter took the effort to create a synergy between the new Jazz idiom of his time and
compositional techniques, like Schoenberg’s 12-tone
system. Unfortunately both Joplin and Schuller’s efforts got lost in the ”losers” side of Music History
and their compositions received bitter critics from
both jazz and classically trained musicians, public
and critics.

This article throws new light on the troublesome question ‘what is popular music?’ by pursuing a genealogy of discourse in Britain during a crucial period from 1860 to 1920 in which modernity is increasingly characterised by an antagonistic relationship between intellectual elites and consumer entertainment. Focusing on social reformism, London music halls, and ragtime, I argue that the term fell into two broad categories of use: first, to identify and / or denigrate mass culture; and second, to establish a pathway for edification and to champion ideals of respectability. Although implicated in the construction of binary oppositions and frequently associated with impropriety, the popular was not always associated with lowness. The idea, however, was shot through with contradictions deriving from a view of ‘the people’ as being simultaneously docile and seditious. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the popular is a floating signifier with the potential to reference mutually opposing ideas.

Cinema and literature are both forms of narration and reality representation, while cinema has visual nature and literature has literary one. In reading we experience the author’s style while in watching movie we cannot. Style is the spirit of the work, which is changed by the movie production process. If the visual signs are properly used, cinema is able to move beyond literature. The visual sign, not only is completely far from the written sign, but also steps further to pass it behind. This article tends to compare the novel Ragtime by E.L.Doctorow, and the movie with the same name by director Milos Forman, by the use of rhizome concept of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Rhizome is the deliberate effort to create resistance against late capitalist society. Rhizome is a safe area existing in a spatial metaphor. This area is influential on people’s ideas and feelings in a capitalist monopolist like system. But in a new stage of economy, the deliberate effort unintentionally fails. In this article, by comparison between the novel and movie of Ragtime, it is shown that re-narration in cinema as a hyper realistic representation of literature, and movie production system support late capitalism in rhizome safe space.
Key words: Late Capitalism, rhizome, comparison, Ragtime, movie production, re-narration, monopoly

This is a historical and analytical study of Ragtime for Eleven Instruments by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). From a traditional ragtime stylistic approach (SCHAFER; RIEDEL, 1973. BERLIN, 1980), this study aims to search for evidence of popular elements in the compositional material of Ragtime for Eleven Instruments and any influence of ragtime arrangements in Stravinsky's piece. Disregarding historical evidence and statements by the composer himself who claimed to have had contact with instrumental parts of ragtime arrangements brought from America by his friend Ernest Ansermet, this comparative music analysis shows similar musical features between Ragtime for Eleven Instruments and examples from the High-Class Standard Rags collection.

TOPRAK, Berkay. George Gershwin’in Rhapsody In Blue Adlı Eserinin Bestecilik
Teknikleri Açısından İncelemesi, Yüksek Lisans Sanat Çalışması Raporu, Ankara, 2018

Caz müziği ile sanat müziği, 20. yüzyılın başlamasıyla Avrupa ve Amerika’da birbirlerini
karşılıklı olarak etkilemişlerdir. Caz müziğinin oluşumunda Afro-Amerikan kültür
mirasının etkisi büyük olmuştur.
Amerikalı besteci George Gershwin (1898-1937), caz temalarının ve ritimlerinin müzikte
ciddi öğeler olarak kullanılabileceğini kanıtlamış bir besteci olarak bu doğrultuda
müzikaller için çok sayıda şarkı, film müzikleri, sahne müzikleri ve orkestra yapıtları
bestelemiştir. İçinde ağırlıklı olarak caz öğeleri barındıran 1924 yılında bestelenen
Rhapsody in Blue adlı eseri de bunun kanıtıdır.
Sanat eseri raporunda bestecinin hayatı, rapsodinin tarihçesi, yaşadığı dönemdeki caz
stilleri ve Rhapsody in Blue adlı eserin besteleme teknikleri alt başlıklarla incelenmiştir.

TOPRAK Berkay. Review of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in terms of
Composing Techniques, Art study report, Ankara, 2018

Jazz music and art music, by the beginning of the 20th century, they mutually influenced
each other in Europe and America. The influence of African-American cultural heritage
has been great in the formation of jazz music.
American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937), a composer who has proven that
jazz themes and rhythms can be used as serious elements in music, has composed
countless songs for musicals, scored for motion pictures, stage productions and
symphonic works. The Rhapsody in Blue, composed mainly of jazz elements in 1924, is
also a testament to this.
In the artwork report, the composer's life, the history of rhapsody, the jazz styles that he
lived in, and the composition techniques of the Rhapsody in Blue were investigated by
the subheadings.

d w a r d H a s s e Piano rolls were an important medium for disseminating ragtime. This chapter presents, for the first time, the story of ragtime on player piano rolls. The authors explain how player pianos work and examine the quantity of rags on rolls, the musical arrangements, the major roll recording artists, and the best-selling hits of piano roll ragtime.

James Price Johnson (1894-1955) is one of the seminal artists of jazz as it emerged in the 20th century. A virtuoso pianist, Johnson mastered ragtime and is understood to have created what is called stride piano. During his formative years — roughly 1917 through 1927 — Johnson’s extraordinary pianistic skills found a place in the exploding player piano industry. In this medium, Johnson was often able to express his evolving pianistic and compositional innovations, both in his own original material and in arrangements of tunes by others. This rollography lists all current salient information about Johnson's piano rolls.

Early Scottish Ragtime is a CD of dance tunes preserved in printed collection from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and published in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. Three types of tune are performed: tunes identified as American in origin, some demonstrating ragtime features and some not; and tunes from British eighteenth century books of dance music, having some characteristics in common with later ragtime-type tunes. Its official release date is 27 th July 2016. I cut down the essay in the CD booklet because it seemed over-long for the context. Here is an original version of the essay, which contains some interesting material not in the CD booklet version together with the rest of the booklet content.

Early Scottish Ragtime, Released by Fellside Records 27th July 2016. Details at http://www.fellside.com/shop/fe-cd/early-scottish-ragtime/

"As a musical form that unites two cultures, Afro-Cuban jazz has been historically problematic for jazz historians and critics to address. In a discipline that embraced a dominant historical narrative emphasizing continuity of style and substance, early jazz studies had little or no regard for Cuban contributions to the American jazz aesthetic. Since the advent of New Jazz Studies in the 1980s, new attention has been focused on the underrepresented and forgotten idioms and figures of jazz history. In this spirit, this thesis examines how New Jazz Studies has reacted to Afro-Cuban jazz and whether or not this music has been given ample critical attention.

While addressing critical issues that impede American scholarship on Afro-Cuban jazz, this thesis also suggests several fresh methods for re-examining this music, many of which are already used in the study of other jazz idioms. These methods are applied to two seminal musical interactions from the Cuban/American musico-cultural canon: the late nineteenth century interaction between danza and ragtime, and the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo--known as cubop--which, sixty years later, continues to inspire musicians."

In addition to written and recorded source lists, interviews with the late trumpeter Manny Duran and saxophonist Bobby Porcelli are also included as personal testaments to this history of collaboration.

Paul Walker interviewed Vic Gammon for Concertina World, the publication of the International Concertina Association. The discussion was wide ranging touching on aspects of my musical output, activities, career, concertina and banjo playing, playing for dancing, syncopation, racism, musicians I have worked with, disguising, and other matters.

This is a historical and analytical study of Ragtime for Eleven Instruments by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). From a traditional ragtime stylistic approach (SCHAFER; RIEDEL, 1973. BERLIN, 1980), this study aims to search for evidence of popular elements in the compositional material of Ragtime for Eleven Instruments and any influence of ragtime arrangements in Stravinsky's piece. Disregarding historical evidence and statements by the composer himself who claimed to have had contact with instrumental parts of ragtime arrangements brought from America by his friend Ernest Ansermet, this comparative music analysis shows similar musical features between Ragtime for Eleven Instruments and examples from the High-Class Standard Rags collection.

In June of 2003 and again, in November of 2003, I traveled to Michigan for the purpose of making extensive field recordings of piano rolls then held in the important roll collections of Nan Flint in Livonia, the late Michael Montgomery in Southfield, and the late Bill Burkhardt in Grand Rapids. My purpose was to capture as many sound recordings of rolls in certain focussed categories as was feasible. These three generous colleagues spent many hours going over my lists, gathering their rolls together, and permitted me to make recordings of what amounted to roughly 500 selections. Many of the rolls I captured on dozens of cassette tapes were either composed, played, arranged or attributed to women artists who made popular (as opposed to classical) music rolls-songs, ragtime, blues or dances-from the 1910s through the early 1930s. While I recorded both 88-note (those without automatic expression) and reproducing rolls (those having automatic expression), a large number of the women's popular rolls were issued in the 88-note format, often on lesser labels. It is this group, the popular 88-note women's rolls, that I am bringing forward first. Both Nan Flint and particularly Mike Montgomery had the foresight to realize that the contribution of women to the popular roll idiom-particularly in the 88-note format-was important to gather and preserve. But it was the breadth and focus of Mike's extremely well-curated 88-note roll collection (decades in the making) that encompassed not only some of the most recognized female names-Mae Brown, Edythe Baker, Pauline Alpert, Hilda Myers, Vee Lawnhurst, Zema Randale, Doris Goodwin, Mabelle Cowan, Constance Mering and Muriel Pollock-but many others now nearly forgotten. While the rolls of lesser-known women artists contextualize the work of their better-known contemporaries, they also offer in their own right performances of uniquely tantalizing interest. Some of the lesser-known women artists who produced excellent rolls include Eva Reeves, Marg Thompson, and Mandy Randolph, but there are others. The 213 roll performances listed on the spread sheet were originally recorded on my cassette recorder, intended for my personal use. They were roughly captured: Mike Montgomery and I took turns pianolizing through literally hundreds of selections on his Steinway upright. Nan Flint fortunately had an electric motor installed in her 88-note player which made playing through the rolls a simpler operation. But despite the roughness, some tracking problems and the fact that rolls were played once through without any practice for expression, the musical content of the rolls shines through. Whether a focussed grouping of similar materials will emerge any time soon is an open question. The three collections-so carefully gathered by all three of these great Michigan collectors-have in the last decade been dispersed. Even though the rolls I recorded likely still exist and have spread out into the larger collecting community, they are no longer centralized as they were in 2003. Thus, I intend is to make these field recordings available to the public. Any suggestions for a permanent repository for them will gratefully be considered.

In this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dance craze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviour in the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts of resistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls. Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the public space of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dance was an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained and indecent physical behaviour by the nation's youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing's ‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancing that was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many of which featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour, as seen in the tango and the apache dance, or clumsy, un-gendered movement, popular in the animal dances of the day. Through ragtime dancing, women performed acts of rupture on their bodies and the urban cityscape, transforming social dancing into public statements of gendered resistance.

Participación en el programa conducido por Eduardo Nordahl en FM 100.9 Radio Mitre de Santa Rosa de La Pampa, sobre el tema de "Antropología de la Música"; 6 de diciembre de 2021.

La grabación completa de esta parte del programa se encuentra en https://1drv.ms/u/s!AisN19ltgXzegZlnIc801ceM8PlgYw?e=MJi6ph

El programa se ha reproducido tal cual se grabó, incluyendo la parafernalia radial característica del género.

En este programa propuse una recorrida por los diversos repertorios de músicas afroamericanas, haciendo hincapié en los estilos que se popularizaron en Africa en los años de la descolonización. Inesperadamente, en lugar de escoger músicas tribales de carácter rítmico o percusivo, los estilos favorecidos en esos años fueron proyecciones de músicas tradicionales de América Latina y del sur de los Estados Unidos reelaborados como una especie de jazz o de swing africano con participación esencial de la guitarra, tocada a solo o en conjuntos en estilo fingerpícking,

Entre las selecciones ya subidas a la red se cuentan:

1) Música de Ghana en los tiempos de la descolonización - https://www.academia.edu/62368646/Ghana_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

2a) Música de Nigeria, parte I - https://www.academia.edu/62375085/M%C3%BAsica_de_Nigeria_I_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

2b) Música de Nigeria, parte 2 - https://www.academia.edu/62376736/M%C3%BAsica_de_Nigeria_II_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

3) Música de Congo - https://www.academia.edu/62378979/Congo_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

4) Música de Senegal - https://www.academia.edu/62381412/Senegal_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

5) Música de Colombia - https://www.academia.edu/62382885/Colombia_parte_I_y_II_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

6) Música de Brasil - https://www.academia.edu/62383989/Brasil_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

7) Música de Jamaica - https://www.academia.edu/62385527/Jamaica_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

8) Música afro de los Estados Unidos - https://www.academia.edu/62387503/M%C3%BAsica_afro_de_los_Estados_Unidos_De_la_m%C3%BAsica_etnogr%C3%A1fica_a_la_m%C3%BAsica_del_mundo

9) Música de raíces africanas en Cuba - https://www.academia.edu/60317868/M%C3%BAsica_de_ra%C3%ADces_africanas_en_Cuba

10) Música de raíces africanas en México y Perú - https://www.academia.edu/60317246/M%C3%BAsica_de_ra%C3%ADces_africanas_de_M%C3%A9xico_y_Per%C3%BA

11) Música de raíces afro de la costa Pacífica de América Latina - https://www.academia.edu/63783479/Musica_de_ra%C3%ADces_afro_de_la_costa_Pac%C3%ADfica_de_Am%C3%A9rica_Latina

12a) De la música de India y África al flamenco, al jazz y al tango (por la vía de Cuba y España) - https://www.academia.edu/60339578/De_la_m%C3%BAsica_de_India_y_%C3%81frica_al_flamenco_al_jazz_y_al_tango_por_la_v%C3%ADa_de_Cuba_y_Espa%C3%B1a_

12b) Raíces afro-latinoamericanas del barroco, del jazz y del flamenco - https://www.academia.edu/60316935/Ra%C3%ADces_afro_latinoamericanas_del_barroco_del_jazz_y_del_flamenco

Otras grabaciones disponibles en https://uba.academia.edu/CarlosReynoso/Music recogen estilos poco conocidos de Bali, India y América Latina.

Die 1920er-Jahre stehen wie kein anderes Jahrzehnt für Aufbrüche und Rückfälle. Wohl in keiner anderen Periode des 20. Jahrhunderts war die Sehnsucht der Menschen nach Neuerungen so gross wie zu jener Zeit. Urbanistische Visionen wurden entworfen, Städte wuchsen in rasanter Geschwindigkeit, klassische gesellschaftliche Rollenbilder wurden hinterfragt und aufgebrochen, benachteiligte Minderheiten verschafften sich Gehör in Kultur und Politik. Der hohe Innovationsgrad dieser Zeit fand direkten Niederschlag in der Experimentierfreudigkeit der Künste.

A phenomenological method of comics analysis can be useful when we need to uncover the structural features of the comics experience itself. One fruitful application would be in the study of irregular intra-panel rhythms, where the temporalized divisions are not visibly indicated but rather are only experienced. By means of Gilles Deleuze's notion of rhythmic repetition and his elaboration of it through Olivier Messiaen's theory of 'kinetic' rhythm, we will formulate a conception of visual rhythm as being based on metrical irregularity. We further explicate this concept of irregular rhythm by drawing upon the notion of 'ragged time' in the early jazz musical form, ragtime. We finally test its usefulness by examining how the 'jazzy' rhythms of Cubist-styled panels by Art Spiegelman and Mary Fleener generate an experience of ragged time.

Edward Elzear "Zez" Confrey (1895-1971) was a famed American composer and piano roll artist, credited with introducing a late-ragtime idiom called novelty piano.  His most famous compositions are "Kitten on the Keys" and "Dizzy Fingers". Artis Wodehouse interviewed his son, Paul Beaumont Confrey (1933-2008)  on 5/16/93 regarding his father's music and career.

First comprehensive German-language treatise on ragtime as an important popular music in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, which had a lasting influence on the jazz era of the 1920s and thus on the music of the century as a whole. Based on my many years of experience as a musician and leader of a ragtime orchestra, I am offering a richly illustrated text that uses all my knowledge and sources accessible to me from my private library (sheet music, band arrangements, books, LP, CD, ...). exhausted via ragtime.
Content: Definition and delimitation of the genre "rag", historical development of ragtime, composers, sheet music/publishers (piano rags, ragtime songs, band arrangements, Red Back Book), the musicians (pianists, banjoists, bands historical/current). ), analysis of the "Pine Apple Rag" as an example (rhythm, form, harmony, melody, original piano and band notes, discussion of performance practice), reception and outlook.
Appendix: detailed description of LPs, CDs and MIDI collections, as well as books (general works, biographies, music books) and magazines, archives/sources for sheet music, ragtime on the Internet (YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, websites)
Also: Glossary of English-language technical terms, list of figures/tables/literature and index.

(Access full text by following the link under '1 file' next to the number of views.)


The escape artist of Doctorow’s Ragtime is in close relationship with each transposed and fictitious character through an aspectual transmission system of character-motivation. The variegated and diverging perceptual and cognitive processes of the numerous characters may reveal a centrifugal system of storyworlds, but the multiform manifestations of being shackled and the desire to escape do meet in the anchoring image of the shackled Harry Houdini and his escape bravura. So Doctorow’s Houdini will be studied here as an aspectual coordinate of the novel.

On the other hand, the mentality emanating from the escape artist’s narrative function of aspectual coordination and the other characters’ positional predicaments and motivational concerns that reflect the same mentality, jointly perform the rhetorical role of suasion. Thus, Ragtime’s Houdini can be subjected to a narrato-rhetorical investigation. I propose that he is a hermeneutically coded cultural narrato-rhetorheme in the novel and the source of further narrato-rhetorhemes of storyworlds that come under his semantic sway. (I introduced the notion of the “cultural narrato-rhetorheme” in a former HJEAS issue [2014/1]). The book’s transposed Houdini is both an overt cultural narrato-rhetorheme (he is present in the narratorial discourse: the narrator actually meets him) and a covert one (embedded in the storyworld). The notions of “repeating,” “factoid,” “contextual,” “assimilative,” and “enthymematic” narrato-rhetorheme will also be introduced as descriptive of Houdini’s manifold narrato-rhetorical roles.

Ragtime’s epistemological tandem (the narrator[s] and Houdini) makes it unequivocal that the modality of the narratorial domain is epistemic. This also sets the escape artist into the novel’s focus; as does the book’s lead (deontic) modality, through the African American ragtime pianist’s defiance of racist cultural prohibition. (ZAN)

In this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dance craze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviour in the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts of resistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls. Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the public space of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dance was an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained and indecent physical behaviour by the nation's youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing's ‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancing that was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many of which featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour, as seen in the tango and ...

The poet, writer and journalist Walter Mehring (1896-1981) was an emblematic artist in 1920s Berlin Cabaret. His contribution to the art of the cabaret flawlessly illustrates the hybrid character of Weimar culture. His songs and poems fell between popular and high culture and formed a part of the contemporary project of an international form of communication in the arts, allying many European and American influences, from the Dada movement all the way to jazz. This article mainly focuses on Mehring’s multilingual poems which were written between 1919 and 1924. It aims to underline two central ideas which the author defended at the time: that of “international literary artwork” (internationales Sprachkunstwerk), largely based on multilingual writing, and that of “literary ‘rag-time’” (Sprachen-‘Rag-Time’) born from the influence of the first wave of jazz in Europe.

https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/the-last-rag/

Composed by SoundEagle🦅, The Last Rag comes in two versions: the 1996 Original Edition and the 2010 Special Edition.

The Last Rag can be performed or listened to as a self-contained work, though it is also the middle movement of the three-movement Second Piano Sonata entitled “The Time Beyond”.

The Last Rag was first performed by Professor Stephen Emmerson in a music recital at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (formerly the Queensland Conservatorium of Music) in 1996, and was performed by David Pitman who played the Second Piano Sonata “The Time Beyond” on 9 October 1997 at the New Music Collective Concert held in the Recital Hall of Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University featuring SoundEagle🦅’s various compositions.

The Second Piano Sonata “The Time Beyond” (to which The Last Rag belongs) was also one of the major pieces featured at David Pitman’s final piano examination required for his Master’s Degree in Performance. The Last Rag was played by Professor Stephen Emmerson and recorded in the Orchestral Hall at Queensland Conservatorium by Daniel Fournier who, along with Peter Laughton, mastered all the edited tracks onto the CD entitled “The Rag Project” and released in 1998. More than a decade later, it had been fondly studied and played by Connie Stamatopoulou in 2009 and 2010.

The Last Rag had also been featured at least once on radio (in the vicinity of 2000 as the precise date is beyond recall) in one of the programmes hosted by Julian Day, an artist, composer and broadcaster who used to present the long-running experimental music programme called “New Music Up Late” as well as “Classic Breakfast and Afternoons” on ABC Classic FM.

The 2010 Special Edition of The Last Rag continues the salient features of the 1996 Original Edition further, including melodic angularity and atonality, contrapuntal textures, motivic extensions, thematic superpositions, harmonic piquancy, chromaticism, suspended tones, nuanced sonorities and dynamic expressiveness. Due to full-time filial commitments, both the score and the recording of the 2010 Special Edition are only just published by SoundEagle🦅 here in 2020.

Regardless of the degree to which the resulting composition may be regarded as an appropriation, reimagination or reinterpretation of classic Ragtime, The Last Rag has patently honoured the well-established tradition and true spirit of Ragtime in the process of sticking fairly closely to, whilst also deviating inventively from, the musical form of Ragtime.  As the accompanying poem indicates, apart from conveying certain personal and philosophical messages, The Last Rag also serves as a meta-commentary or meta-narrative to ragtime as a century-old genre, evoking nostalgia and contemplation, as well as simultaneously reflecting, acknowledging and transcending the eras and heritages of ragtime and related genres. Overall, SoundEagle🦅 has sought greater freedom, unity, sophistication and expressiveness in The Last Rag to reach beyond the stereotype and confined scope of this unique genre whilst exploring innovative techniques to decisively push the envelope of the Ragtime vernacular and its vocabularies.

Those who have performed, orchestrated or analysed The Last Rag to a high standard are welcome to contact SoundEagle🦅 for the possibility of their work being featured.

Major sections:
    Enlargeable Banner with Caption and Description
    Special Heading with Animated Moths/Butterflies
    The Last Rag Poem
    The Last Rag Notes
    The Last Rag Poll
    The Last Rag Visualization
    Audio Playbacks
    Video Captures of Score with Music
    Gallery of Score Sheets
    Printable Scores
    Ragtime Encyclopaedia
    Conversations between SoundEagle and Readers/Audience

During the twentieth century, jazz was at the center of multiple debates about social life and American experience. Jazz music and its performers were framed in both positive and negative manners. The autobiographies of New Orleans musicians Sidney Bechet and Warren Dodds provide insight into the general frames they used to frame jazz experience and agency sometimes at odds with dominant discourses. Through Michel Foucault’s notion of ethical substance, I analyze the way in which jazz is constructed in their autobiographies. Several themes are used by both autobiographers to frame their actions, which are constructed in a complex and ambivalent manner revealing both the ethics of jazz and its covert culture.

This chapter locates Stravinsky’s engagement with twentieth-century popular culture in context, from his fascination with ragtime and jazz to his abortive career as a Hollywood film composer. I draw comparisons with the early work of Eliot and Picasso, reading Stravinsky’s rewriting of African American syncopated music as a kind of aural Cubism. Delving into critical reception, I show that contemporaries were as concerned with the political implications of this supposedly atavistic work during the 1920s as was Adorno. Throughout, I pose the question of whether such music traverses what Andreas Huyssen has termed the ‘Great Divide’ between modernism and mass culture, concluding that it served not to destabilize such binaries but rather to uphold them.

Resumo: A presente comunicação visa discutir aspectos relacionados ao conceito das diásporas musicais, conceito tomado de empréstimo de autores como Stuart Hall e Paul Gilroy e que aqui se aplicam ao trânsito das matrizes musicais fundamentalmente africanas aplicadas a gêneros musicais das Américas tendo como pano de fundo a formação da identidade cultural moderna brasileira através de um ragtime composto pelo saxofonista Severino Rangel de Carvalho, o Ratinho, e seus desdobramentos frente ao paradigma do tresillo. Palavras-chave: Diásporas Musicais. Ragtime. Ratinho Eu e Eles: Diasporas and musical migrations throughout Ratinho's ragtime. Abstract: This Communication aims to discuss aspects related to the concept of musical diasporas borrowed from authors such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and here applied to the transit of, in general use, African musical matrices related to popular musical genres of the Americas, having as background the Brazilian construction of its modern cultural identity throughout one ragtime composed by the saxophonist Severino Rangel de Carvalho (Ratinho), and the representations of the tresillo paradigm.