3. A Case for Ragtime from Hiram
Kelly Moderwell in 1915
The arguments against ragtime as a genre of
popular song and as instrumental music in the United States clearly
failed. Ragtime went on to become the
foundational form of popular song in the United States and the rags of Scott
Joplin and his associates found a place in the piano literature in formal piano
instruction. Had the opponents of
ragtime in 1900 heard the directions popular song has taken in the last century,
they would likely regard musical barbarism as having completely overtaken what
is left of civilization.
When the piano rags of Joplin can show up in a
list of Dover scores in the second edition of John Borstlap’s The Classical Revolution the evolution
of ragtime from vulgar popular song to canonized piano music might seem
complete. It now takes the work of a
Dale Cockrell to remind us that ragtime was once a style of dance music that
evolved in the brothels and dance halls of an underground network of sex
industries.
More than a century after the
popular style swept across the United States, defenses of ragtime in its heyday
can be easily forgotten, if ever known, and the defense made for ragtime by
Hiram Kelley Moderwell from 1915 in The New Republic seems worth quoting in
full to give readers a sense of what a defense of ragtime as the original and
indisputably American contribution to then-contemporary musical life looked
like.
Hiram Kelly Moderwell
"Ragtime"
The New Republic
October 16, 1915 pages
284-286
It has been nearly twenty
years, and American ragtime is still officially beyond the pale. As the one
original and indigenous type of music of the American people, as the one type
of American popular music that has persisted and undergone constant evolution,
one would think it might receive the clammy hand of fellowship from composers
and critics. There is very little evidence that these gentlemen have changed
their feeling about it in the last ten years. Then they asserted that it was
"fortunately on the wane "; now they sigh that it will be always with
us. That is the only difference.
I can't feel satisfied with
this. I can't help feeling that a person who doesn't open his heart to ragtime
somehow isn't human. Nine out of ten musicians, if caught unawares, will like
this music until they remember that they shouldn't. What does this mean? Does
it mean that ragtime is "all very well in its place?" Rather that
these musicians don't consider that place theirs. But that place, remember is
in the affections of some 10,000,000 or more Americans. Conservative estimates
show that there are at least 50,000,000 copies of popular music sold in this
country yearly, and a goodly portion of it is in ragtime.
And these musicians prefer
to regard themselves as beings apart. This is a pretty serious accusation for
the musician to level against himself. I don't mean that wherever 10,000,000
Americans agree on a thing they are necessarily right. Their sentimental
ballads are the mere dregs of Schubert and Franz Abt. But ragtime is a type of music substantially new in musical history. It
has persisted, grown, evolved in many directions, without official recognition
or aid. You may take it as certain that if many millions of people persist in
liking something that has not been recognized by the schools, there is vitality
in that thing. The attitude toward folk-music at the beginning of the
nineteenth century was very similar. A Russian folk-song was no less scorned in
the court of Catherine the Great than a ragtime song in our music studios
to-day. Yet Russian folk-song became the basis of some of the most vigorous
art-music of the past century and no musician speaks of it to-day except in
terms of respect. [emphasis added]
The taste of the populace is often enough toward the shoddy and outworn. But when the populace creates its own art
without official encouragement, then let the artists listen. I haven't a notion
whether ragtime is going to form the basis of an "American school of
composition." But I am sure that many a native composer could save his
soul if he would open his ears to this folkmusic of the American city.
[emphasis added]
But the schools have their
reply. "Ragtime is not new," they say. "It is merely
syncopation, which was used by Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and is
good, like any other musical material, when it is used well." But they are
wrong. Ragtime is not "merely syncopation." It is a certain sort of
syncopation—namely, a persistent syncopation in one part conflicting with exact
rhythm in another. But of course this definition is not enough. Ragtime has its
flavor that no definition can imprison. No one would take the syncopation of a
Haydn symphony to be American ragtime." Certainly not," replies the
indignant musician. Nor the syncopation of any recognized composer. But if this
is so, then ragtime is new. You can't
tell an American composer's "art-song " from any mediocre art-song
the world over. (Permit me to pass over the few notable exceptions.) You can
distinguish American ragtime from the popular music of any nation and any age.
[emphasis added]
In the first instance the
love of ragtime is a purely human matter. You simply can't resist it. I
remember hearing a negro quartet singing "Waiting for the Robert E.
Lee," in a cafe, and I felt my blood thumping in tune, my muscles
twitching to the rhythm. I wanted to paraphrase Shakespeare—
"The man who hath no
ragtime in his soul,
Who is not moved by
syncopated sounds "...
and so on. If any musician
does not feel in his heart the rhythmic complexities of "The Robert E.
Lee" I should not trust him to feel in his heart the rhythmic complexities
of Brahms. This ragtime appeals to the primitive love of the dance—a special
sort of dance in which the rhythm of the arms and shoulders conflicts with the
rhythm of the feet, in which dozens of little needles of energy are deftly
controlled in the weaving of the whole. And if musicians refuse to recognize
it, as they once refused to recognize Russian folk-music, they criticize not
ragtime, but themselves.
But ragtime is also
"good" in the more austere sense of the professional critic. I cannot
understand how a trained musician can overlook its purely technical elements of
interest. It has carried the
complexities of the rhythmic subdivision of the measure to a point never before
reached in the history of music. It has established subtle conflicting rhythms
to a degree never before attempted in any popular or folk-music, and rarely enough
in art-music. It has shown a definite and natural evolution—always a proof
of vitality in a musical Idea. It has
gone far beyond most other popular music in the freedom of inner voices (yes, I
mean polyphony) and of harmonic modulation. [emphases added] And it has proved its adaptability to the
expression of many distinct moods. Only the trained musician can appreciate the
significance of a style which can be turned to many distinct uses. There is the
“sentimental manner," and the "emotional manner" and so on; but
the style Includes all the manners, and there have not been so many styles in
musical history that they couldn't be counted on a few people's fingers.
It may be that I am
deceived as to the extent of ragtime's adaptability. But I think of the rollicking
fun of "The International Rag," the playful delicacy of
"Everybody's Doing It," the bustling laziness of "Waiting for
the Robert E. Lee," the sensual poignancy of "La Seduction"
tango, and the tender pathos of "The Memphis Blues." Each of these pieces
has its peculiar style—in the narrower sense—deftly carried out. And I know
that we are dealing here with a set of musical materials which have no more
than commenced their job of expressing a generation.
We must admit that current ragtime is deficient
on the melodic side. Some of the tunes are strong, but many of the best ragtime
pieces have little beyond their rhythmic energy and ingenuity to distinguish
them. If we had a folk-song tradition in America our popular melodies,
doubtless, would not be so permeated with vulgarity. The words, also, too often
have the chief vice of vulgarity—sluggish conventionality—without its chief
virtue, the generous warmth of everydayness. And this latter quality, when it exists, resides not so much in
the words themselves, as in the flavor of the songs, the uninspired but
tireless high spirits of the American people.
But ragtime words have at least one artist
quality of the highest rank. They fit the music like a glove. These songs
appeal to the people who expect to sing them, a people who have no oratorio or
grand opera tradition behind them, and who come quite naturally to the ideal of
wedded music and verse which Wagner had to struggle for against his whole
generation. [emphases added] I shouldn't be
surprised, in fact, If the origin of the " rag " is to be found in
the jerky quality of the English—or shall we say American—language, which found
in the negroes Its first naive singers. One of the negro "spirituals"
runs thus:
" An' he gave them
commishun to fly,
Brudder Lass'rus!
An' he gave them commishun
to fly."
The tune, as always in
negro songs, follows the exact accent of the spoken words. But just imagine
what Messrs. Moody and Sankey would have done to them! As you walk up and down
the streets of an American city you feel in its jerk and rattle a personality
different from that of any European capital. This is American. It is in our
lives, and it helps to form our characters and condition our mode of action. It
should have expression in art, simply because any people must express itself if
it is to know itself. No European music can or possibly could express this
American personality. Ragtime I believe does express it. It is to-day the one
true American music.
HIRAM K. MODERWELL.
Several things stand out in this defense of
ragtime. First and foremost, as noted by
Edward Berlin in Ragtime: A Musical and
Cultural History, Moderwell’s defense of ragtime made repeated reference to
ragtime as performed music whereas
Daniel Gregory Mason’s attack on ragtime consistently made reference to printed
scores to demonstrate the deficiencies of the style (location 1129 in the
Kindle edition).
Second, Moderwell’s defense of ragtime makes
consistent reference to ragtime as a genre of popular song. We’re given a defense of ragtime based on the
natural hand-in-glove fit of the American vernacular verse to the complex
syncopation and rhythmic vitality of musical setting. If the lyrics were not
exactly highly cultivated verse Moderwell’s defense is that the music was a
perfect fit for the American vernacular language you would hear in an American
city.
Moderwell’s other notable defense was to
compare ragtime to Russian folk music—if Russian folk song was viewed with
scorn by cultivated people during the time of Catherine the Great by 1915
Russian folk song had famously become the foundation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which premiered in
1913. Moderwell didn’t name Stravinsky’s
work but he arguably didn’t need to.
Moderwell’s advocacy for ragtime as actually
good music reminds me of Doug Shadle’s Orchestrating
The Nation and more generally of his advocacy that we “cancel the
nineteenth century”. Without specifying
that it’s the pernicious classist and racist aspects of the legacy of German
Idealism in American music education, canceling the nineteenth century would
involve canceling ragtime, which I refuse to endorse. But I can easily understand how there have
been musicians and composers and music educators in the United States over the
last century and a half who have believed whole-heartedly that the path toward
a real flourishing of American music may be held back for as long as musical
institutions keep finding American music wanting in comparison to the
nineteenth century gods of the musical art-religion of Beethoven or Wagner.
In the annals of polemic
against American popular song and American popular music more generally
virtually no one made a more sustained case against American music ever
attaining the level of “art” than Theodor Adorno and it is to Adorno’s
arguments throughout his career we finally turn.
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