800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz Go Through the Early History of Popular Music (a digression)

Evan: Herr Hauptmann, I’m afraid you suffer from Manny Ax Syndrome.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What syndrome is that? And what does Emanuel Ax have to do with any of this?

Evan: Well, as I hope you know, Emanuel Ax is one of the greatest pianists of this, or any, time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He’s a bit too intellectually curious for my taste.

Evan: Well, that’s not his problem.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s the world’s problem.

Evan: Regardless, Manny Ax is an amazing musician, but I remember reading an interview in Amazon. Manny recommended his favorite recordings. It was a great list: Cortot’s Chopin, Fleisher’s Beethoven, Adams’s Harmonielehre, Eugene Onegin, Oscar Peterson, and some other great discs. But there was only one thing to besmirch this otherwise terrific selection... Remember Two Things by Dave Matthews Band, which he said he was introduced to by his daughter.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Was ist Dave Matthews Band?

Evan: Dave Matthews Band was a fad rock group in the late 90’s which still sells out everywhere they perform. But music lovers have not taken them seriously in more than ten years. Every note Dave Matthews ever played is a love-letter to blandness and boredom.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: (finds Remember Two Things on youtube) Sounds like just another blundering American musician to me.

Evan: A much worse American musician than Manny Ax. But apparently, like you, Manny Ax can be the height of discernment on classical taste, yet a blithering idiot on any matter outside his purview. Apparently, his taste in non-classical contemporary music is precisely the same as millions of people who do not have enough interest in music to ever be interested in classical music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: This is what happens when you try to appease the vox populi.

Evan: I don’t think that’s quite true. I think he genuinely liked what he heard. But unlike the rest of the world, he wasn’t subjected to Dave Matthews every day for four years, and he never had a chance to grow to hate them the way the rest of us did. And this is your problem too Herr Hauptmann. If you listened to David Hasslehoff for more than five minutes every five years, you’d want to kill yourself. But you like David Hasslehoff in the same way that Manny Ax likes Dave Matthews. It’s so bland that it doesn’t even offend the sensibilities of any out of touch classical music lover, and therefore by listening to it you won’t have to challenge any of your preconceived notions of what true art is.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! Now I remember who Dave Matthews is! Isn’t he der new judge on American Idol?

Evan: No, that’s Keith Urban. You’re confusing your douchebag musicians who're popular in the South. And you never told me you watch American Idol!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I watch to observe the badness of American music.

Evan: At what point does this continual need to experience the badness of American music become a love of something you claim to hate? It’s almost like a form of pornography for you.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’ve never looked at pornography in my life!

Evan: You should probably try it, it’ll make you happier.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Infamy! How dare you suggest such a dirty thing!

Evan: Albeit don’t do that dirty thing in my house.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you suggest that any popular music will laed me to anything but suicide?

Evan: Because some of it is great!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’ve heard enough of it to know that is not true.

Evan: No you haven’t. If I’d listened to as little popular music as you did, I’d have probably concluded that everything was crap too.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you admit that it’s dreck!

Evan: No. Not at all. I admit that 70% of what people generally listen to is dreck. 20% of their music is mediocre. 5% of it is decent. 3% of it is good. 1.5% is great. And roughly .5% of it is as great as the greatest classical music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is still .5% too much!

Evan: Herr Hauptmann, I’m willing to meet your snobbery most of the way. But you’ll have to settle for at least a small compromise. I’ve heard too much that’s good to ever regard my culture’s music as a total waste.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What need there is for compromise when you are right?

Evan: The need is because you’re not right.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: History will vindicate me!

Evan: I guess that’s possible in some strange way, but you won’t be around to hear its verdict. In any event, there are already Americans who feel the same way as you, only they feel that way about American Jazz Music. To some Americans, music begins in New Orleans around 1920 and ends in New York around 1965.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach, Jazz. The barbaric horror of the jungle.

Evan: That barbaric horror is constructed from the same folk roots from which your beloved Deutsch Musik hails.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Prove it!

Evan: Alright. What’s most jazz improvisation except just the same way of developing counterpoint and ornamentation around a ground bass or cantus firmus?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it is such an inferior way of so doing!

Evan: Why is it inferior?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because it is not written down! There is nothing planned, and therefore we cannot control the music!

Evan: Why can’t it be planned? Duke Ellington used to write out most of his instrumentalists’ solos. And even if they’re not written down, what do you think recording is? It’s just a new way of establishing permanence.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But they still do not control the music.

Evan: Sure it is. It’s just a different way of controlling music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it sounds so disorganized.

Evan: And yet when your beloved Furtwanglers and Edwin Fischers bend the tempo or rhythm, that doesn’t sound chaotic to you?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein. Because they do so to underline the harmonic rhythm and invention of der grossten meister!

Evan: Well, it’s just a different sort of rhythm in 20th century music. Most 20th century music takes the emphasis away from harmony and puts it on rhythm, often extremely complex rhythm. You might almost say that if the 19th century was about harmonic rhythm, then the 20th century was about rhythmic harmony.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Welche art von Bullshit ist das?!

Evan: Alright, you asked for it. I’m going to give you the quickest journey through 20th century music’s mainstream that you’ll ever get.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It had better be quick...

Evan: Let’s start with Scott Joplin. Let’s just say he’s the American Bach. (Puts on a recording of Maple Leaf Rag)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How could you dare even to mention this in the same sentence as Bach?

Evan: Because he’s at a similar waystation in music history. Bach took the accomplishments of the great polyphonists and created a music comprised of harmonic rhythm. Scott Joplin took the harmonies of the German tradition and created a music generated entirely by rhythm itself. Listen to those harmonies, they’re pure Schumann but with more rhythmic emphasis.  

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not you dare compare this mull to the Tondichter.

Evan: Alright, well, I give up. Did you hear about the lost impromptu by Schubert that was just premiered? It’s really beautiful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Gruss Gott! Can I look it up on youtube?

Evan: Sure. Here, I’ll put it on for you. (puts on Solace by Scott Joplin)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Prachtvoll! Simply magnificent! Listen to those chromatic innovations, as daring as anything until Schoenberg! Yet still mit die inner glut!

Evan: So...I have a confession to make.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh nein....

Evan: That was Solace by Scott Joplin.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Then I don’t like it.

Evan: What do you mean you don’t like it!? You just exclaimed it was Prachtvoll!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because Schubert would have written it in the correct spirit. When Scott Joplin writes something like this, it is unconnected to the proper wellspirit of music history and culture!

Evan: That’s entirely in your mind. You can will yourself to like and dislike anything you want with that mentality.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What’s wrong with that?

Evan: Everything! Rather than focus on what strikes your ear as beautiful, you’ll just have a checklist of requirements from music which limit your reactions.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Some reactions are undesirable and base.

Evan: Why does it have to be that way?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because it is the base of the kultur which redeems us all from the terrors of our world!

Evan: What if it doesn’t?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it does!

Evan: There’s no arguing with you. But for reasons passing my understanding, I’ll continue to preach to you. Try George Gershwin.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: At least he tried to write classical music.

Evan: He didn’t try. He succeeded. He was one of the great geniuses of the century, and had he lived past 38, he might have become the greatest composer of the 20th century and rescued classical music from the ghetto in which you’re so keen to keep us.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is unfair. It is not a ghetto. It is liberation!

Evan: Says the man who never leaves my couch.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Your couch is the most liberated part of you!

Evan: Anyway, if Joplin is the American Bach, then perhaps Gershwin is the American Handel. He’s ostentatious and theatrical where Joplin is inward, and yet he has far more expressive range and diversity than Joplin just as Handel did than Bach. He wrote at least one of the greatest operas ever written. He can write amazingly dramatic music for seemingly every scope and every mood, including dark ones, and also wrote some of the most artlessly beautiful music ever composed.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Er ist ein Nachahmung eines Komponisten.

Evan: Alright. Well then you’ll loooorve the next two.... Whereas Joplin and Gershwin both established their fame in the North, the other two ‘founders’ of American music established their eminence down South. They might be considered the “Vivaldi and Scarlatti” of American music because they took forms which other people used, produced literally hundreds of compositions in exactly the same form, and in so doing made these new forms palatable for a new era.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I don’t care much for Scarlatti, and Vivaldi is terrible - the same boring sonatas and concerto 500 times!

Evan: If you listened to the new period practice recordings of Vivaldi you’d probably feel differently. But the new Vivaldi was a man named W. C. Handy, who grew up in rural Alabama and came up with the idea of notating the local form, the 12-bar blues pattern. He realized that you could become an endlessly inventive songwriter in that form, in music that could be endlessly adapted and still retain its universality. If you hear him in a great performance, Vivaldi makes minor keys fun. But W. C. Handy makes major key music into something sad.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: There is no way to make a major key sad! It is a violation of music’s fundamental laws!

Evan: Not only is there is no such fundamental law, but music is usually better when expectations like that are subverted. W. C. Handy wrote songs that smile through their tears, much as Mozart composed or Chekhov wrote.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is absolutely unfair to Mozart and even to Chekhov!

Evan: Is it? It’s just a different aesthetic, but no less profound.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Great workmanship is part of profundity! And there’s no need for workmanship in a 12-bar blues pattern!

Evan: Sometimes, you’re right. But that’s when the music is bad. When the music is good, there is an entirely different kind of workmanship that goes into it. And even when workmanship is great, instinct and emotional resonance are just as important. A great craftsman who expresses nothing but his craft (ahem, Hindemith) is infinitely less worthwhile than a mediocre craftsman who communicates with infinite expressive force (ahem, Janacek).

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I do not disagree, but I believe Janacek is an inferior composer.

Evan: Of course you do. Anyway, let’s look at our final composer before I go to bed. If W. C. Handy is the Vivaldi of the American “Mass” Tradition, then Jelly Roll Morton is our ‘Scarlatti.’ Scarlatti created the ‘sonata’ as we know it today. He may not have rendered it to the scale we see in Beethoven or even Haydn, but he created the binary sonata form in embryo, at the smallest possible scale. In almost exactly the same way, Jelly Roll Morton did the same with Jazz. The kernel of every innovation which Jazz later pioneered can be found in his pieces - the rhythm, the instrumentation, even the modal and chromatic harmonic daring of bebop.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Has it occurred to you that you’re generalizing and that these descriptions of American musicians are as worthless as your ‘Great Conductors’ Lists.

Evan: Of course, but who cares? In any event, we’ve digressed, and you certainly have a point. I’m already getting bored with these analogies, and we haven’t even made it to the Louis Armstrong/Haydn connection. In any event, let’s think about what comes next before we continue this dialogue.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Long as I don’t have to listen to more of this Dschungelmusik I’m fine with that.

800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (part 3)

Evan: So you realize that that list I gave you of the best current conductors is worthless.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Gott sei dank! It was a chamber of horrors!

Evan: That’s a little extreme.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Why have you come back to the side of light?

Evan: Because that list was just a list of general practitioners. In order to make greater music, you need to have specialists who understand the composer on a deep level and take the necessary risks to create true understanding.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you admit that our world is diseased and requires the greatness of poettonesoundconsolation to lift us to a better!

Evan: No. I think the world is a hard place, and music helps us through it.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! So you do admit it!

Evan: Alright. Sure. I admit that poettone... is that even a word in German? … is helpful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: ein Sieg fur die Musik!

Evan: But you should understand the reason I did this. The conductors I named are, fundamentally, safe conductors who take no risks. At their best, they combine amazing energy and passion with intellectual rigor. But they take relatively few risks, because they understand that a risk is a risk because it’s usually not successful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh nein. I worry again that you do not understand...

Evan: Maybe not, but I think the real glories of today’s performances of orchestral music are to be found elsewhere.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’m very afraid to ask where they are?

Evan: Well, let me think...what performances by living and active performers completely changed my understanding of the piece and made me love music even more...hmm... (Herr Hauptmann grows ever more open-mouthed at the list) … Harnoncourt's late Mozart Symphonies, Marc Minkowski’s Messiah, Gardiner’s St. John Passion, Harnoncourt’s Magnificat, Paul McCreesh’s Creation, Rene Jacobs’s Zauberflote, James Levine’s Marriage of Figaro, Gardiner’s Don Giovanni, Paavo Jarvi's Eroica, Thomas Fey’s Pastoral Symphony, Thielemann's Beethoven 7, Blomstedt’s Beethoven 9, Gardiner’s Missa Solemnis, Abbado’s Barber of Seville, Dudamel’s Symphonie Fantastique, Masur’s Italian Symphony,

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Stop! Please Stop!

Evan: I can keep going for another hour at least.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You have betrayed the greatness of music for the dirtiness and disease of our base, cruel worldtime! .

Evan: Why do you take these things so seriously?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because music is the food of the soul! Without your soul, you enter the horror of the unclean. You may even start liking Italian Opera!

Evan: I do like Italian Opera!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Grauel!!!

Evan: Suit yourself.

Hauptmann: The worst part is, you do understand the soul of music. In this list great treasures of the spirit there are.

Evan: I’m not even sure the soul exists. But you’re right that music is a serious business and should be taken seriously. But come on man, you sound like you’d burn musical heretics if given half the chance. And do you even believe in God?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I believe in music!

Evan: Touching... really... but if you believe in music, why do you hate so much of it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because music is a temple, and we must keep it clean for worship.

Evan: And Wilhelm Furtwangler is it’s prophet?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja! Furtwangler ist der Gottheit!

Evan: Do you have any idea how ridiculous you’d sound to anybody but me?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Let the outside world dissolve in mist! For us there would yet remain our holy art!

Evan: Holy German art?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is not my fault that no other kultur cares for the mysterium tremendum! Every other kultur is obsessed with sex and dirtiness!

Evan: Excessive Russian literature lovers say the same about Russia, Italian art lovers say the same about Italy, Greeks say the same about drama and philosophy, Franch...everything lovers say the same thing about France. No doubt, the time’s coming when Americans begin to say the same thing because of the holy temple of American cinema.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Everything you mention is a glory of the world... except die Franzosich...

Evan: And everything else is besmirched by our diseased world?

Hauptmann Rinderherz:Fast alles.

Evan: Here,... why don’t I put something on for you.

(Evan goes to his laptop, puts on Duke Ellington's Come Sunday)

Evan: Now can you honestly say that this is not food for the spirit?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach! Listen to that scheissetext!

Evan: And Schubert never set a bad text? And Wagner’s own texts aren’t crap?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: And those Falschung Debussy harmonies!

Evan: These harmonies are not Debussy at all! I tried to arrange this for chorus, I couldn’t figure out some of those chords and I have the perfect pitch to pick every note out of a hexachord by ear.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Has anyone ever told you you’re a f*cking ausfall?...

Evan: And who cares about who influenced the harmonies?! It’s what he does with them that matters. And this is some of the most spiritually consoling music since Bach!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You are deluded. This is Americanischen popularkultur Mull!

Evan: This is not Mull! Here, listen to this... (puts on Old Man River by Jerome Kern)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh Freud, nicht dieser tone!

Evan: The lyrics are truly great by any standard, and so is the song.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you pretend that scheisse is fit for anything but Schweine?

Evan: Because this the opposite of scheisse. It’s a glory of the world.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Next you’ll tell me that Bob Dylan is great!

Evan: He’s not my favorite, but I do love a few of his songs.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: All his music sounds the same!

Evan: So does Mozart’s!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You are disgusting.

Evan: So’s Parsifal, but I let you listen to it when you want.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I shall not be treated in this manner!

Evan: You want me to stop insulting you?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I want you to stop insulting music!

Evan: You should hear what other music lovers say. Many of them believe Dylan is the Beethoven of American music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do I care what they think?

Evan: You’d probably be happier if you did.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I do not seek to be happy! I seek to be uplifted!

Evan: Alright, well try another one. Here’s A Change is Gonna Come from Otis Redding, the American Schubert. It wasn’t written by him but this is my favorite performance.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you think to compare to Schubert when this man did not even write this unbedeutend lied.

Evan: Redding wrote many great songs of his own. But there’s nothing unbedeutend about this song, it’s about the civil rights struggle, and you could even see this as being a song about spiritual hope, or even as a response to the Ode to Joy!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do Americans know about spiritual hope or joy?

Evan: Most of them know a lot more than you do.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I know the joy of a better world than this one! What is the terribleness of this world compared to the greatness we bring from true music?

Evan: Well you’re listening to true music right now! But you don’t get it because your mind is closed.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: My mind is clear!

Evan: Your mind is farcockt.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Farcockt you!

Evan: Alright, this is getting too heated. Let me try one or two last pieces of music. (puts on Find the Cost of Freedom by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: A decent volkslied. Nothing more.

Evan: Alright. Try this one... (puts on Hooked on a Feeling by David Hasselhoff)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh. Ja. Ja. Das so gut ist! Listen to that beat! Like geschlechtsverker!

Evan: Oy gevalt. I thought you might have this problem...

800 Words: American Bach - Scott Joplin

I played a puppet show last night. That’s right, a puppet show. I met an art professor from MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) at a party and she needed a band to play entr’acte music at a slam puppet show (yes, Slam Puppet Show) she ran. It was a great experience and an incredibly fun show to play. But no thrill in that show could equal the shock of the familiar I experienced when the strains broke out in one of the puppet shows of Solace by Scott Joplin in the late Marvin Hamlisch’s ultra-slow, soft performance which he prepared for The Sting.  The Sting is an otherwise overrated movie, the greatest accomplishment of which was to do America the great service of calling attention to one of its greatest artistic voices.


(After hearing Hamlisch’s version of Solace, you can never hear another, even Joplin’s. Every other rendition sounds choppy and superficial in comparison. Every other performance puts emphasis on rhythm, but in this performance, the emphasis is on Joplin’s harmonies, which are as masterful as any composer who ever lived. Every other performance of this piece looks forward to the jazz and rock eras, but when you hear Hamlisch play it, it becomes a European work to stand with the greatest miniatures of Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and Bach himself.)

I couldn’t help it, I was instantly distracted from the puppet show and almost broke down in that combustable mixture of watery eyes and adrenalin that you think is only possible when you’re a teenaged music-lover and pieces call to you in a numinous moment that you know will change the way you view yourself forever. There it was, a pure music, an American music, that cuts through you with all the serrated ridges of the European masters. A music grounded in all the European practices, yet completely American. A music founded in all the masters who came before, but a music that uncovers a new world of meaning for a new era.

Just as Bach consolidates all the musical learning of an era that combined science andreligion to create an image of a benevolent universe with a compassionate,loving creator; Scott Joplin consolidates all the musical meaning of an era in which the realization dawned that existence may precede essence, and we are thrown into a world in which, if we are brave enough, we may follow our blissto an enjoyment that is personal to each of us, and as irresponsible to the rest of the universe as we could possibly hope to be.   


(A piano roll Joplin cut of The Entertainer in 1916, in sound that is not altogether impressive. But this piece is perhaps THE kernel from which all later American music was developed.)

Scott Joplin is the beginning, the source, the mouth, of American music. Perhaps even more than Louis Armstrong or Bob Dylan, Scott Joplin’s music is America with the mirror turned in on itself. Every aspiration of this country, every nuance of its temperament, is reflected in Scott Joplin with a definition it has perhaps never received since. The great American music before him John Philip Sousa, which seems to long for the imperial militarism of Europe, and Stephen Foster, which speaks of an era of easy living for rich white folk in the South; and ever since has spoken of nostalgia for that era which many Southern Whites feel unapologetic for their longing to recapture. In both cases their music, however great at times, was constricted by the musical straightjackets of aristocratic European society. Rhythms must always march in strict time, songs must express an extravagantly poetic longing for things most people never feel. In some ways, both Foster and Sousa thrived on their limitations, but they both were contained to the  limited world of expression which it would ever occur to sheltered whites from south of the Mason-Dixon to ever write down. It took the son of a slave from Northeast Texas to express something more.

(The Magnetic Rag, played by Joshua Rifkin. Scott Joplin’s last composition before his death in 1917 – the dark emotions expressed in this piece are unmistakable.)

 
It’s a little too easy to dismiss Scott Joplin as a writer of rags that are as interchangeable as any Sousa march. But I think the differences become clear when one hears the two played in excellent performances. Sousa becomes merely a writer of marches that are extremely rousing but pointlessly bombastic. They belong as an encore at the end of a program – an evening of them would be torture. But when you hear a Joplin performer of excellence and imagination like Marvin Hamlisch, or Joshua Rifkin, or Gunther Schuller, or Joplin himself, the music becomes as expressive as anything ever written for the keyboard - containing as much tortuous pain within his achingly beautiful chords as uninhibited joy.

(The Pine Apple Rag – another ultra-slow adaptation of a Joplin piece, which savors the harmonies. This time it’s arranged by Gunther Schuller for brass band and conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. There is nothing here but a profound, and extremely American, spiritual darkness – which tries to make light of even the most desperate hours.)

But like Bach before him, Joplin closes an era of musical expression. In Bach, the era of polyphony is taken to its glorious end, and Bach works out a system of how polyphonic voices (many voices which do completely different things yet the parts fit together cleanly) can be simultaneously homophonic (many voices act together as one voice), and in Bach’s music a profound musical drama is enacted entirely through harmony for the first time with no aid from polyphonic ostentation. In Joplin, the era of extravagent expression drawn forth from tonal harmony and strict binary form is brought to an equally glorious end (I don’t say that lightly), and from Joplin’s music, far more than Stravinsky’s or Schoenberg’s or even Bartok’s, a kernel of a new approach to music is created; a music that relies upon rhythm rather than harmony as music’s foundation. After Joplin, music no longer needs a complex harmonic structure to express universal emotions, and harmonies become simple enough that melody and lyric altogether replace instrumental harmony, their place reinstated as music’s primary means of expression. From Joplin, the world transitioned to ever simpler visions of music, first the semi-improvisation of Pops and Duke, to the full improvisation of early Miles and Coltrane, to the song lyrics and electronics of The Beatles and The Stones, to the emphasis on pure rhythm of Public Enemy and Tupac.

(The Gladiolus Rag. Another stunning Schuller/Hamlisch arrangement.)

It is odd to think that this entirely harmonic music, with no accompanying words, could be the antique foundation stone for the contemporary music that 99% of the world population listens to regularly. And yet Joplin unmistakably marked that beginning – and not just musically; he was the first musician whose music regularly sold copies by the hundreds of thousands. His music was, in many ways, the first work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. When Joplin began his career, the world of music was defined by the parlor piano, and any family with middle class aspirations would entertain
themselves by sitting around a piano and being proficient enough at the instrument to play whatever music was at hand. But by the time Joplin passed away in 1917, the gramophone had long supplanted the piano as the focus of home musical entertainment. Once machines could produce sheet music on Joplin’s massive scale, it was only a matter of years before machines could produce music itself. Joplin died nearly forgotten by the next generation of musicians. Jazz replaced Ragtime as the primary expression of America’s spiritual life, and the through composed masterpieces of Joplin seemed too classical, too repressive, too redolent of an era when blacks still had to make their living by pleasing white people.  

(A stunning sounding piano roll of Joplin playing the Maple Leaf Rag in 1916, written in 1902, reproduced on a modern piano. It is said, without definite verification, that the sheet music to this rag was the first to ever sell one million copies.)

But Joplin’s glory outlasted many of the younger musicians who spurned him because only he made them possible. In an age which guaranteed the artist’s freedom to create from ever more basic means, the artist had to reciprocate to his public. In the modern age, if music wants to touch every emotion and sentiment in the human experience, it must entertain first, enlighten second. There were examples of this lighter vision of music from the dawn of Western musical history, but from the madrigals of Arcadelt to the Operettas of Franz Lehar, such music could only entertain privileged classes fortunate enough to partake in entertainment sophisticated enough to require a great expense of time to learn and money to appreciate. But a composer wants to express emotions to which all of humanity can relate in an age when music can be distributed to millions in a matter of days, he or she can no longer aim to be merely understood by a small cadre of admirers. To write in such an mid-19^th century manner would be more than a quaint anachronism, it would be a negation of a potential audience of millions from whom one can learn. The standards by which great music, truly great music, is judged in our era is no less rigorous than those of previous eras. But if music wants to express universality, then it must be written for the purpose of attaining a universal reach. However unlikely it seems, perhaps it’s more difficult in our age than ever to create truly great music - which must be complex enough to take in all that experience endows us, from the most joyful and funny to horrible and saddening to witty and lowbrow to civilized and barbaric to real and unreal, to known and unknown to what we are and what we become. And all this must be rendered in a way simple enough to be understood by millions and millions of people. 

That, above all else, is Joplin’s great contribution to music and why he is as important a musician to the Pax-Americana as Bach was to the era of the Great European Powers. Bach celebrates the perfect universe as it seemed upon rationalism’s dawn; during that five-minute fissure when it was conceivable for rationality to coexist with God in a respectful partnership of equals. Joplin celebrates an imperfect universe as it seemed upon the demise of reason’s promised utopia, only for reason’s denizens to find that God had abandoned them. Europe was built as a monument to the glory of God, then sustained as a monument to the reason which God endowed us. But like all sons, the son must feel as though he’s defeated the father, and while Reason defeated God rather handily, reason proved equally impractical to the resolution of human problems.   In our era, the importance of joy, pleasantness, pleasure, and happiness most importantly, revealed themselves as an endeavor to which no ill-born family ever need apologize for aspiring towards, as the profoundest of all our era’s revelations is the realization that in an era of material well-being, nothing but what is in ourselves need ever stop us from being happy. Bach is the beginning of that journey in which catered music away from the tastes of the church and aristocracy to the tastes of the bourgeois. Joplin marked a new beginning, taking musical taste away from the bourgeois to a music whose appeal transcends all class distinctions. Like Bach, Scott Joplin showed us, musically and spiritually, all those unexplored rooms of the new musical house. And precisely what message was sent from that room to his listeners on piano rolls, 331/3 short players, hi-fi LP’s, 8 track cassettes, VCRs, CD’s, and internet streaming? The message is Beethoven’s and Schiller’s Universal Kiss! Music that reaches the infinite of what music may express, to as infinite a number of people as who can listen. In our age, art which leaves entertainment as at least a secondary concern is completely out of touch with mainstream of what audiences demand. Those insisting rhythms of Scott Joplin suggest a world which demands to be entertained, and to which enlightenment is a very subtle secondary concern and requires a true artist merely to conceal it.

(Tremonisha. Joplin wanted to reform opera for the duration of his career into something equally serious and entertaining - sounding rather like the Mozartean ideal - but never managed to get either of his operas produced. The score was thought to be lost until 1972, at which point a vocal score was unearthed and Gunther Schuller prepared the orchestrations.)

Except as an expression of resentment or contempt, high art is a 19^th century concept with no meaning for our time. The very idea of art on high implies that the work itself owes your allegiance to it simply for the privilege of its existence. We live in an age which demands that seriousness of purpose not be a virtue. Above all else in our era, we demand to be entertained. Serious discussion and contemplation is in itself a form of entertainment – connected not to struggles to understand the ultimate purpose of life, rather, simple curiosity for the world around us with infinitely less existential importance than discussions of first causes and salvation which previous centuries undertook intellectual endeavor.  No longer do cultural figures express the emotions of great men, as though their experiences are the sole experiences which should elicit comment. Works of art, for thousands of years, were only great because a person with more authority told you it was great. Art itself, with its connotation of its Middle English meaning, when art meant ‘are’, ponders the questions of being as only a culture which believes in the supreme and infinite importance of figuring out what thou art with absolute correctness, lest the margin of error send us to an eternity of bestial torture. But a society with no such infinitely existential corundums requires nothing so weighty to be taken upon one’s person. In entertainment, the sadness of the world is no longer something we must capture and lift so much of it upon our shoulders with the singular aim of ridding the world of its crippling hold. 

Sadness is just one in the seeming infinity of means at an entertainer’s disposal, who passes the time by making your life interesting – in small spurts making you feel as many emotions as the world contains. By 2013, the best among us realize that any art which insists upon a precondition to fully understanding it as its writer intended, like belief in God or reason, is limited in meaning unless the today’s audience finds the piece itself entertaining. And if an ambitious writer/playwright/artist/musician wants to display the entire world, he must be both artist and entertainer – able to capture the world in all its profundity and profound variation, yet also able to display the world in a manner that causes the world to look at itself and listen. That was the accomplishment of Walt Whitman, it was the accomplishment of Mark Twain, it was the accomplishment of Orson Welles, and it was the accomplishment of Scott Joplin

( A suite of Joplin’s music as heard in The Sting.)