Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 11: Ragging the Classics ... with the music of Giuliani and Sor

11.     Ragging the Classics, with some help from the music of Mauro Giuliani and Fernando Sor

Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History

Edward A Berlin

University of California Press

Copyright 1980, 2002 by Edward A Berlin

ISBN: 978-1-5040-30649-9

At Location 1521 and Location 1573, Edward Berlin noted that the musical game of “ragging the classics” dated back to the beginnings of the ragtime era.  The basic game was to translate an older established classical work into the new popular style.  Particularly popular for this musical game were works by Mendelssohn, although works by Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff were also given a “ragging the classics” treatment. 

As a guitarist with some familiarity with the guitar sonatas of the early nineteenth century guitar virtuosi, I find it easiest to demonstrate how “ragging the classics” could work by presenting a before and after of a short excerpt from one of the guitar sonatas of Mauro Giuliani, and Gran Sonata Eroica is probably one of the easiest works in the early guitar sonata literature to rag.

To transform the theme into a rag one has only to do the following:

A similar transformation into a ragtime style is possible for Fernando Sor’s E flat etude from his Op. 29 series. Sor’s charming little sonata in E flat major lends itself so readily to becoming a ragtime piece very little has to be done.

Before:

And after:

Now just in adapting Sor’s Op. 29, study No. 10 I’ve already demonstrated how readily his little sonata movement could be turned into a ragtime sonata.  Of course I deliberately interpolated material from another Sor etude into the development section for the fun of it because that other hook from another Sor etude can plausibly be thought of as a free inversion of Sor’s first theme in the E flat etude. 

Having rather briefly demonstrated how “ragging the classics” , applied to early nineteenth century guitar music by Giuliani and Sor, can use material from sonata movements, reversing the process,  writing sonatas with ragtime themes, may nevertheless take a bit more theory and history.  It shouldn’t need to, but the sheer scope and scale of Adorno’s ultimately pernicious influence in debates about the merits and demerits of American popular music merits a more detailed and patently theoretical discussion. Proving Adorno wrong in music was the easy part, proving that Adorno was wrong even on the basis of theoretical claims about the concepts of time and space in music requires a rebuttal at the theoretical level on which Adorno made his claims.