The Entertainer (stop right before the last note of the A melody)
You know how it goes. Even the people who have no idea about Scott Joplin's other music know this one. Some of you might have heard the astonishingly idiomatic sounding dixieland arrangement by Gunther Schuller?
Gunther Schuller (first half)
But have you heard this colossal, Lisztian, jazz cover from the late great Henry Butler?
Henry Butler (complete)
And have you heard my personal favorite, this version by Jacob Koller, one of the most promising young musicians of our time?
Jacob Koller (complete)
More than anything else, this is the extraordinary quality of American music - its endless, infinite adaptability. An adaptability we have only begun to explore. Every great song written in this country has a seemingly infinite capacity for covers, adaptations that can utterly transform the simple foundation of popular music into cathedrals of complexity.
This strikes me as the next logical step in the evolution of American popular music, an evolution that is an extraordinarily bittersweet development. The American empire clearly now enters its second half, and as the so called 'Greatest Generation' dies off, so does living memory of an era when America was not clearly the dominant world power. We can no longer remember a world where the center of cultural influence was somewhere other than right here, and from such insularity comes inevitable decline. And as America becomes more isolated in its own points of view, so the American story begins to be codified, and its art canonized into something far more hardened as people have so many memories of American music that they find it much more hard to admit new music into their daily consumption. Just as happened to Europeans around the 1870s, Americans will demand more and more to hear the repertoire of music they already love, they will become much more gatekeeping in their attitudes, much... more... classical. Jazz has long since arrived at this point, so has old time and bluegrass, soon will rock and R&B, and in the sense of samples, hip-hop has already got there. American popular music will calcify into the repertoire of American Classical Music, and be as ossified as any concert hall; while the popular music of the world becomes something from countries very very far afield from us both geographically and spiritually.
Concerts of American music, which once could be counted on to inevitably introduce bands with new songs in every concert, will increasingly be demanded to play old favorites. But with the filtering of less worthwhile repertoire, and with repeated performance of the better among old songs, the standard of performance may become unfathomably steep, because with every performance from a great performer the audience will demand something new, opening up new possibilities for songs we thought we knew everything there was to know about. It's the ultimate revenge of European classical music on the music that made it irrelevant to daily life in America.
But this classical music may in fact turn out to be more interesting even than European classical music. In European classical music, however great the original compositions, and compared to most American popular music, European classical music is Original with a capital 'O', the possibilities of interpretation are minimal at best. The performer, however well remunerated or adored, is in every way the junior partner of the composer; a glorified craftsman, and no matter how many liberties taken, the performer is ultimately a recreative artisan through whom the composer speaks. But in what I believe will become known as American Classical Music, the performer is a full partner, perhaps even the senior partner, through whom the unforeseen musical possibilities of the composers' original material present themselves.
Or take this, Joplin's second most famous rag, the Maple Leaf Rag. We'll start with a piano roll of Joplin.
(Joplin - cut at 1:18) (Jelly Roll Morton - splice in - cut at 1:19) (Earl Hines - splice in - cut at 1:09) (Sidney Bechet - splice in - cut at 1:44) (Emerson Lake & Palmer - splice in - cut at 0:54) (Marcus Roberts - splice in - cut at 1:57) (Jon Baptise - splice in - let finish) (Petite Feet - splice in - let finish)
And we have to assume that whatever they left for the recording microphone is a cleaned up, edited version of all the bizarre experimentations they tried in concert. That was Scott Joplin playing the Maple Leaf Rag, followed by Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Sidney Bechet - that was definitely the best don't you think? Followed by Emerson Lake & Palmer, then Marcus Roberts. There are all sorts of Marcus Roberts interpretations of it on youtube, completely different from this one. Then Jon Baptiste, Stephen Colbert's band leader. And then finally the avant garde jazz band, Petite Feet, which we finally let go to the B-section so you could experience that jaw dropping drum solo.
In a sense we just saw the process of any piece of music's evolution in performance. Starting with the original conception of the composer, to an adaptation different from what the composer wished in Jelly Roll and Earl, to a kind of pinnacle in Sidney Bechet, that comes with us with the force of revelation of just how extraordinary this music can be. It then attains the kind of ripened decadence of overfamiliarity in Marcus Roberts, to the adaptation for completely different purposes in Jon Baptiste, to complete deconstruction in Petite Feet.
And once all those various interpretive extremes have been exhausted, a piece of music truly has a classical tradition. let's just hear a very simple classical rendering of the piece from 2004, played just about exactly as Joplin wrote it, but with the wisdom of a generations long performing tradition. The pianist is Alexander Peskanov, a Russian-Jewish performer who would seem to have no cultural inheritance from Joplin.
(Alexander Peskanov)
Simple, unaffected, direct, but all manner of subtlety, but with all sorts of barely noticeable colorings and rhythmic emphases that it would probably didn't occur to the composer. This is what it means to have a classical tradition. Music exists in the air, but even classical music does not exist in the sky, it exists here on earth, where there are all sorts of meanings that would have never occurred to the composer or the first generation of performers. And from what lawyers and jurists would call stare decisis; the precedent, the inherited practical wisdom of generations of interpreters, the next performer can form a composite of options that he thinks will create the best performance, so that even the most faithful recreation of a composer's original vision will sound completely different from the composer's own performance.
The Bible says that a properly allotted lifespan is three-score and ten, and that strikes me as likely. So allow me to modestly submit that it usually takes roughly 70 years or so for a cultural artifact to lose the proper context of living memory so that we might begin to appreciate the thing in itself for what it is and perceive what value it might retain when removed from its original use. It was 1973, 71 years after the Maple Leaf Rag brought Joplin to national attention, that the movie The Sting was released - a film about tavern card sharks taking place at the turn of the century which won Best Picture. Joplin's music was the soundtrack, sometimes in Dixieland orchestrations by Gunther Schuller and Marvin Hamlisch. Three years later, Joshua Rifkin released his revolutionary set of Joplin rags on the piano, which made a new case for Joplin's music as concert music as fit for piano recitals as Chopin or Schubert, and in that same year, Gunther Schuller's performing edition of Joplin's only remaining opera, Tremonisha, for which Joplin earned a well-deserved posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Receving at 108 the respect from the classical community he should have received when he was 35.
This strikes me as the next logical step in the evolution of American popular music, an evolution that is an extraordinarily bittersweet development. The American empire clearly now enters its second half, and as the so called 'Greatest Generation' dies off, so does living memory of an era when America was not clearly the dominant world power. We can no longer remember a world where the center of cultural influence was somewhere other than right here, and from such insularity comes inevitable decline. And as America becomes more isolated in its own points of view, so the American story begins to be codified, and its art canonized into something far more hardened as people have so many memories of American music that they find it much more hard to admit new music into their daily consumption. Just as happened to Europeans around the 1870s, Americans will demand more and more to hear the repertoire of music they already love, they will become much more gatekeeping in their attitudes, much... more... classical. Jazz has long since arrived at this point, so has old time and bluegrass, soon will rock and R&B, and in the sense of samples, hip-hop has already got there. American popular music will calcify into the repertoire of American Classical Music, and be as ossified as any concert hall; while the popular music of the world becomes something from countries very very far afield from us both geographically and spiritually.
Concerts of American music, which once could be counted on to inevitably introduce bands with new songs in every concert, will increasingly be demanded to play old favorites. But with the filtering of less worthwhile repertoire, and with repeated performance of the better among old songs, the standard of performance may become unfathomably steep, because with every performance from a great performer the audience will demand something new, opening up new possibilities for songs we thought we knew everything there was to know about. It's the ultimate revenge of European classical music on the music that made it irrelevant to daily life in America.
But this classical music may in fact turn out to be more interesting even than European classical music. In European classical music, however great the original compositions, and compared to most American popular music, European classical music is Original with a capital 'O', the possibilities of interpretation are minimal at best. The performer, however well remunerated or adored, is in every way the junior partner of the composer; a glorified craftsman, and no matter how many liberties taken, the performer is ultimately a recreative artisan through whom the composer speaks. But in what I believe will become known as American Classical Music, the performer is a full partner, perhaps even the senior partner, through whom the unforeseen musical possibilities of the composers' original material present themselves.
Or take this, Joplin's second most famous rag, the Maple Leaf Rag. We'll start with a piano roll of Joplin.
(Joplin - cut at 1:18) (Jelly Roll Morton - splice in - cut at 1:19) (Earl Hines - splice in - cut at 1:09) (Sidney Bechet - splice in - cut at 1:44) (Emerson Lake & Palmer - splice in - cut at 0:54) (Marcus Roberts - splice in - cut at 1:57) (Jon Baptise - splice in - let finish) (Petite Feet - splice in - let finish)
And we have to assume that whatever they left for the recording microphone is a cleaned up, edited version of all the bizarre experimentations they tried in concert. That was Scott Joplin playing the Maple Leaf Rag, followed by Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Sidney Bechet - that was definitely the best don't you think? Followed by Emerson Lake & Palmer, then Marcus Roberts. There are all sorts of Marcus Roberts interpretations of it on youtube, completely different from this one. Then Jon Baptiste, Stephen Colbert's band leader. And then finally the avant garde jazz band, Petite Feet, which we finally let go to the B-section so you could experience that jaw dropping drum solo.
In a sense we just saw the process of any piece of music's evolution in performance. Starting with the original conception of the composer, to an adaptation different from what the composer wished in Jelly Roll and Earl, to a kind of pinnacle in Sidney Bechet, that comes with us with the force of revelation of just how extraordinary this music can be. It then attains the kind of ripened decadence of overfamiliarity in Marcus Roberts, to the adaptation for completely different purposes in Jon Baptiste, to complete deconstruction in Petite Feet.
And once all those various interpretive extremes have been exhausted, a piece of music truly has a classical tradition. let's just hear a very simple classical rendering of the piece from 2004, played just about exactly as Joplin wrote it, but with the wisdom of a generations long performing tradition. The pianist is Alexander Peskanov, a Russian-Jewish performer who would seem to have no cultural inheritance from Joplin.
(Alexander Peskanov)
Simple, unaffected, direct, but all manner of subtlety, but with all sorts of barely noticeable colorings and rhythmic emphases that it would probably didn't occur to the composer. This is what it means to have a classical tradition. Music exists in the air, but even classical music does not exist in the sky, it exists here on earth, where there are all sorts of meanings that would have never occurred to the composer or the first generation of performers. And from what lawyers and jurists would call stare decisis; the precedent, the inherited practical wisdom of generations of interpreters, the next performer can form a composite of options that he thinks will create the best performance, so that even the most faithful recreation of a composer's original vision will sound completely different from the composer's own performance.
The Bible says that a properly allotted lifespan is three-score and ten, and that strikes me as likely. So allow me to modestly submit that it usually takes roughly 70 years or so for a cultural artifact to lose the proper context of living memory so that we might begin to appreciate the thing in itself for what it is and perceive what value it might retain when removed from its original use. It was 1973, 71 years after the Maple Leaf Rag brought Joplin to national attention, that the movie The Sting was released - a film about tavern card sharks taking place at the turn of the century which won Best Picture. Joplin's music was the soundtrack, sometimes in Dixieland orchestrations by Gunther Schuller and Marvin Hamlisch. Three years later, Joshua Rifkin released his revolutionary set of Joplin rags on the piano, which made a new case for Joplin's music as concert music as fit for piano recitals as Chopin or Schubert, and in that same year, Gunther Schuller's performing edition of Joplin's only remaining opera, Tremonisha, for which Joplin earned a well-deserved posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Receving at 108 the respect from the classical community he should have received when he was 35.
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I propose that like a lot of 19th century light music, only perhaps more so, Joplin's piano rag had two uses. One was the extraverted, rambunctious use within the smoke-filled tavern and burlesque house and brothel, where it was meant as a lubricant social and otherwise to keep the good times rolling, perhaps the way a piano bar still does today, where it was played at extremely peppy tempos (to use slang of Joplin's own time), probably subject among pianists to all sorts of virtuoso tricks and ornamentations and even improvisations, in other words - 'Jazzed up,' in manners that depart so enormously from the score in exactly the way that jazz pianists eventually did within the standards of the real book. or perhaps some by other composers too, or The other was the introverted, private use, where amateur musicians could learn the music at a slow speed in their parlor, and savor the aching harmonic poignancy.
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Even if the rhythm is strict, Joplin's music is the ebb and flow of life, the happiness and the sadness, laughter and tears, intermingled together. How many other artists managed this? In most of Shakespeare's plays and characters he could only do it by compartmentalizing them into tragic and comic - occasionally you get a comic figure like Falstaff or Rosalind who manages both. Perhaps it's easier in music: Mozart obviously did it, perhaps a few other composers did it like Schumann and Dvorak and Janacek, certainly Louis Armstrong and The Beatles from more popular genres. But in literature, all I can think of is Chekhov and Dickens, probably Cervantes and Montaigne, perhaps Mark Twain or George Eliot, or maybe Saul Bellow and VS Naipaul from our century, but even among novelists, where you'd think the tragicomic is the main vein, it's tough to think of writers who genuinely make you laugh at the same time as they move you. It's almost easier in the movies when you get it from Jean Renoir and Ozu, Spielberg and Woody Allen, Chaplin, in our era and country you might consider that we get it from Spike Lee and Sophia Coppola, Richard Linklater and Alexander Payne. In TV you definitely get it from The Simpsons and Cheers, perhaps from The (American) Office or My So Called Life, and if you can stomach it these days, you can certainly get it from Louie. But no matter how you square it, look at this honor roll of a list. No matter what the era, this is some of the very greatest creators in the history of art, and this is exactly the mighty sort of company Scott Joplin should take his place within.
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Maple Leaf Rag
The Entertainer
The Easy Winners
Euphonic Sounds
Weeping Willow
Country Club - Ragtime Two Step
Solace - A Mexican Serenade
Pine Apple Rag
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