might take a little break, a postlude to Ragtime and Sonata Forms where I talk briefly about Henry Martin's ragtime-with-fugue and Richard St. Clair's Piano Sonata No.7 both ragtime classical fusion works that I like but have some criticisms of

Ragtime and Sonata Forms is finally done and since it amounted to 131 pages of content I think maybe that gives me some wiggle room to take a break from blogging about anything for a while.  Plus it lets the entire series stay on the main front page for a while in case people want an easier time of reading through the whole thing.  There are also hard links to each installment at the separate music page.

I've thought about blogging about Henry Martin's ragtime and fugue in G flat major as part of the project.

You can check out a lively performance of the piece that breaks down the work into its sections over here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWzGZspu6I

Fugue starts 2:37 and runs through to the end.



There's a lot I like about this piece but as ragtime I'd say it's way too complex.  There are strains but the strains get toccata like development episodes before they're completed which, this being a prelude and fugue it makes sense.  But at another level I'd say that Martin's piece, fun though it is, has made the classical music aspect of polyphonic and post-Romantic virtuosic display more high profile than it would be in traditional rag, or even maybe novelty rag a la George Cobb.

I do think that ragtime and fugue can work but having a ragtime lead into a fugue that reprises the fugal and ragtime strains is working at a level that's more abstract than audiences, or even musicians, may readily follow. And being something of an Ives fan, I think that cumulative setting might work better.  Find your ragtime strains and then use cumulative setting or cumulative form to develop preluding material; make your fugue subject just part of the first strain of your rag; and then let that incomplete ragtime strain idea as subject create an expectation that an audience familiar with rag will have that at some point the full A strain will appear. A Haydnesque critic of Martin might be to say there are too many good ideas thrown together too quickly so that you can't remember them (and as a Haydn fan and someone who went and got Martin's entire cycle, I'm not just saying that, the piece is cooler at a theoretical level than it is a piece that lingers in the mind after I hear it played).

Work has been done to put sonata and fugue into ragtime over the last thirty years and Henry Martin's work isn't even the only example I wanted to get to.

Take Richard St. Clair's Piano Sonata No. 7, which I think is a more memorable piece between the St. Clair and the Martin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUdG49V7BGw

It might hew more closely to an eighteenth century sonata form (not that I mind that part) than to ragtime but St. Clair took more effort to clearly delineate his thematic groups and, since he composed the Sonata No. 7 for the centennial of the publication of "Maple Leaf Rag" he was more attentive to having a more explicitly Joplinesque style.

He even has a pretty sweet fugato passage about 2:35 in his opening sonata form.

Pertinent to my own position, these are attempts that veer so far into the classical approach they lose the aspect of ragtime that's most noticeable to fans, which is what Adorno would have damned as the obviously modular construction aspect of the style.  What to an Adorno would be the unforgivably schematic nature of audible structures where you see the building blocks being lined up is one of the charms of ragtime.  I think there are ways, per Ragtime and Sonata Forms, where composers can play with the time-space of rag and sonata types to preserve the recognizably self-contained aspects of ragtime strains while working them into the large-scale structures and developmental paradigms of sonata but if I could sum up my sympathetic criticism of the Martin and St. Clair attempts to work ragtime into the prelude and fugue form and the sonata cycle respectively it's that they nailed the style as style but sacrificed too much of what makes ragtime recognizable as dance music (and song) to the aims and interests of the concert pianist repertoire.

Which is not to say I don't have anything nice to say about the works.  I enjoy listening to the pieces but I don't enjoy them even half so much as I enjoy listening to Joplin or Scott or Lamb.  I've been thinking about why that is as I've worked on the research and the eventual writing of Ragtime and Sonata Forms so I thought I'd share that here as a kind of postlude before I take a bit of a break from blogging.

By the way, for anyone who wasn't reading back in 2016 Ragtime and Sonata Forms is kind of the other side of a long-term passion of mine to bridge the distances I've seen and heard between "classical" music and American popular styles.  There was a survey I did of early 19th century solo guitar sonatas composed by Diabelli, Molitor, Matiegka, Giuliani and Sor a few years ago.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20survey%20of%20early%2019th%20century%20guitar%20sonatas

It was during that process of blogging (and earlier, back in 2014-2015 or earlier than even that) that I began to notice how readily Giuliani and particularly Carulli sonata themes could be recomposed as ragtime strains.  So as an experiment in hobbyist musicology the 19th century guitar sonatas survey was the officially classical side while the recent project is more theoretical but from the ragtime side, although both styles are by now subsumed into "classical".  Still, as a classical guitarist I'd say that what's most interesting for me has been recognizing that the early 19th century European concert music for the guitar seemed to have a lot of points of overlap with late 19th century American popular music and that the key to developing a fusion of these two essentially nineteenth century styles of music (both probably falling on the "wrong" side of German Idealism and the "New German" school) would be to abandon nineteenth century conceptions of theory, form and development in favor of what might be called a more neo-galant approach.

So if you read the "Ragging the Classics" part and wondered why I chose just early 19th century classical guitar pieces, that's the reason, it's one of my other musical passions and I thought it made sense to show that, whatever ideological and aesthetic turf wars were going on between highbrows and lowbrows, looking at the music itself in score forms, the distances between sonata forms and ragtime seem negligible.