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Livin' the Ragtime Life
| Article
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21904 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
2,741 Words |
| Author
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Jack Ketch
Jack Ketch writes on music and the arts. |
Ragtime was America's musical Declaration of Independence.
To hear veteran ragtime trouper and scholar Max Morath tell it, not only was ragtime America's first original, nationally popular music, "It was an attitude!"--one that cut across regional, social, ethnic, and gender lines.
Morath occupies a unique space as an entertainer/spokesman in American music and history. Spearheading a ragtime revival, he created three highly successful off-Broadway one-man shows. His two series on popular music for public television, "The Ragtime Era" and "Turn of the Century" are considered definitive. His One Hundred Ragtime Classics is the first extensive modern anthology of classic ragtime tunes.
Ragtime, Morath explains, was invented by talented young black musicians. It arrived on the national scene at the Chicago World's Fair in the summer of 1893. By the turn of the century, music publishers along Tin Pan Alley were printing ragtime tunes. People heard it on the new piano rolls and in vaudeville and movie houses. Middle-class women at home all over America played it on parlor pianos.
The Chicago exposition celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyages. The "White City," the architectural centerpiece of the fair, was an aggregate of palaces, canals, and gondolas--the Gilded Age encased in white plaster. In the Electricity Building, new technological wonders were unveiled--electric lights, phonographs, wireless telegraphy, kinetoscopes, telephones, snapshot cameras, and pianolas.
Ethnic diversity was the theme along the mile-long amusement thoroughfare, known as the Midway. Persian, Japanese, and Indian bazaars rubbed shoulders with a Chinese city a Hungarian Orpheum, a Lapland town, and an African Dahomey village. Immigrants from many countries celebrated, in turn, their ethnic heritage. Thirty thousand Czech and Moravian immigrants celebrated "Bohemian Day," when they heard their celebrated countryman, composer Antonin Dvorak, conduct his Eighth Symphony.
Entertainers, reformers, and politicians all took their turn. Daily shows were presented by Lillian Russell, Buffalo Bill, and Florenz Ziegfeld (who had come to preview what soon would be called the Ziegfeld Follies). Suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony presided over a Woman's Building. Ignace Paderewski played Chopin in the Music Hall.
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