Back in 2019 I posted a link to this piano sonata by the composer Richard St. Clair, I'm sharing it again because I have finally gotten around to listening to the work but also studying the piano score. Longtime readers already know that the prospect of synthesizing ragtime vocabulary with sonata forms has been a passion project of mine and you go to the music page and scroll down to see a table of contents for Ragtime and Sonata Forms, which was mostly written in 2020 and has become an intermittent, ongoing blogging project here at Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Richard St. Clair: Ragtime Sonata (Piano Sonata no. 7)
The work was performed by the composer and you can hear it on his YouTube channel.In the composer's words, "This sonata was composed in 1997 to commemorate the centennial of the first published ragtime composition in 1897. The composer performs."
This is a fun piece and there is a lot I like about it. The fugue exposition in F major in the second part of the first movement promised to be a blast of a fugue ... if it had been a fugue from start to finish. The slow movement has some beautiful passages.
The internet and its age being what they are the jaded reader already suspects I have things that I'm going to say that are "critical" and, yes, that's true. There are gorgeous passages all over this sonata and yet, if you've listened to the piece and gone through the score yourself, and have also been reading my blog for ten or twenty years you can probably guess what I'm going to say. When I discussed Ethan Iverson's appraisal of Nikolai Kapustin I took his writings as a springboard to suggest that what he was hearing and not hearing in Kapustin's piano sonatas was this--Kapustin was strong on thematic presentation but weak at thematic differentiation.
At the risk of speaking generally, 20th century experiments in ragtime sonatas use 18th century norms as mediated by 19th through 20th century top-down "plans" to make sonatas out of generally original creations. Within ragtime as a performance practice and composing tradition there's centuries of "ragging the classics". A guitarist could take etudes by Sor, for instance, and transform those into the ragtime idiom while retaining sonata forms. It's also possible to just transform a theme by Wagner or Mendelssohn into the basis for a ragtime strain. Somewhat famously, a ragtime composer made a novelty rag by transforming a Rachmaninov etude into a rag.
But ever since I read Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms a few years ago I was finally able to grasp what has so often felt missing from ragtime sonata experiments and I think it connects to what I have intuited Ethan Iverson has not heard in Kapustin sonatas, that thematic presentation and differentiation in styles have norms and traditions you need to respect. In ragtime strains are generally sixteen measures long and consist of two compound phrases that are four bars a piece. Any Joplin rag probably suffices. If you were to write a sonata form using Joplin's style then you'd want those big blocks of sound to be inviolate. The themes need to be able to have those internal repeats and different endings that launch into subsequent themes. Those norms of presentation and differentiation need to be treated as non-negotiable. To put it in Greenberg's terms, ragtime sonatas will work best when they are bottom-up and functionalist, relying on a paradigm of convergent evolution of a trait such as flight in bats, birds and butterflies rather than superimposing a top-down "textbook" approach.
If you can't imagine how to make a sonata form using Joplin's themes in their mainly unaltered state then I'd say steer clear of writing a ragtime sonata. You should be able to take up a work like The Cascades and make a sonata without making a significant change to its themes.
About two years ago I discussed how double variation form could be approached in a way that can accomplish the functions of sonata forms. For transforming a Scott Joplin style rag into a sonata form you can have your A strain and your B strain in different keys; you can then have one variation each on those strains to fulfill the function of a development section; you bring the A strain back like you already would in a Joplin rag anyway; and then the B theme comes back in the tonic key. Maybe you introduce a C strain as you move along or maybe you end with the B strain the way James Sylvester Scott and Joseph F Lamb did. Maybe you bring back the A strain. The general outline of what you'd get might be something like this.
Exposition Development Recapitulation
C major G major any key(s) C major to end
A A B B A1 B1 A B B C(C) or A or end at B
Fans of ragtime may already be noticing a big potential problem. Generally B strains in rags start on a non-tonic chord. Can you make a sonata where Theme 2 starts on a non-tonic chord. Of course you can, and that was one of the crucial observations Jason Yust made in Organized Time that helped me think about how easily rag can be modified to fit the "behavioral outcome" of a sonata form without shoving ragtime vocabulary into the Procrustean bed of a 19th century German theorist's idea of what sonatas forms ought to do.
Peacherine Rag is already a sonata exposition, for instance, but let's say that you wanted a somewhat smoother connection between your A and B strains. An option you can use is to transpose the A strain into relative minor. The B strain is kept in the major key. When you play the recapitulation of such a sonata the ABA alternation of a ragtime gets preserved in the recapitulation; yet in the exposition the effect you get is that an A strain in relative minor lets you move to a B strain that kicks off with the V-I alternation typical of a rag. You could have a G minor A strain leading to a B flat major B strain in the exposition and then everything could be G major in the recapitulation.
Yoel Greenberg proposed that a sonata form could have two of three components. The first component would be the "medial caesera" and that would correspond with a sonata exposition which may or may not repeat. The second component, "double return", is the traditional concept of a sonata recapitulation in which the first theme comes back in the tonic key. The third component is "end rhyme" which corresponds to the idea that Theme 2 and/or 3 come back in the key of Theme 1 from the exposition. You need only have any two of three to have something that qualifies as a sonata form.
This, then, is where the concept would apply to a Joplin rag. If you repeat the A and B strains internally you have fulfilled the function of the first component without having to create a sonata in which Theme 1 and Theme 2 are separated by a modulating transition. In slow tempo sonata forms by Haydn and Mozart there wasn't even a need for a transition. Take this idea and go with it. A ragtime sonata can have a first and second ending for an A strain that leads to the B strain. The B strain in this new kind of rag would be in a new key.
But the best part about taking this approach to ragtime sonatas is that you can compose an AABBA pattern like you would any traditional rag and you know in advance that this will be your recapitulation. Let's pretend for sake of conversation that the AABBA complex is cut down to ABB. Well, that could be your recapitulation. The ABB could also be ABBA and based on Sugar Cane Rag. The exposition would be ensuring the two strains are in different keys. The development can be that the A and B strains are given variations of some kind.
Hepokoski and Darcy pointed out in Elements of Sonata Theory that a crucial concept for understanding 18th century sonata forms is the concept of "rotation". This means that themes presented in the exposition will tend to appear across the development and recapitulation zones in the order in which they appeared--if they don't that becomes the basis for understanding something unusual or unique about the work that reflects a creative decision. Double variation form using ragtime strains can accomplish the same things outlined in Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements without having any of the "textbook" elements of a sonata form as you might be told there must be in 18th century practice.
You could just flip the A and B strains from Scott Joplin's The Silver Swan Rag, for instance, and have yourself a working sonata exposition just observing Joplin's internal repeats.
With ragtime strains that are just good rather than great you could even do something like playing each strain just once in distinct keys. A C strain in E flat could be followed by a D strain in B flat, for instance, that you get in a Joplin rag. The double variation paradigm can then be applied to create a sonata form in which there are no repeats.
As Yoel Greenberg so aptly put it, if you have two of the three components the third one you left out is disposable. This has many advantages, one of the biggest advantages being that you can create a movement with no repeats that uses ragtime themes that isn't a sonata and isn't just a set of variations. You can now set up a rondo or a ternary form or a variation form or even a fugue if you want. Greenberg's insight in How Sonata Forms was to point out that, so long as a top-down monothetic taxonomy was imposed on musical materials the reality, you could use a bottom-up flexible approach where a simple majority of traits gets you "sonata".
You will have noticed I reduce the sonata down to A and B strains. This doesn't have to be the case. There can be three-themed ragtime sonatas. Joplin famously used a four-strains pattern of AABBACCDD. His A and B strains are justifiably legendary while his C and D strains are often, dare I say it, just great. Well, if you create a sonata form from the A and B strains the C and D strains can become the basis of a more formal double variation pattern.
key E B c# A E E
strain C D C1 D1 C D etc
Or double variation can be used with non-repeating themes to establish a kind of sonata pattern.
Thinking about the concepts of thematic presentation and differentiation have helped me get a clearer sense of how and why classical attempts at making ragtime sonatas have missed and hit at the same time. If what you come up with is so steeped in the 18th century norms (or modern pedagogy about what those norms are in contrast to actually immersing yourself in the music) you may come up with a ragtime sonata approach that no fan of ragtime could recognize as sounding all that raggy. The listener needs to be able to hear it as a rag that happens to behave like a sonata rather than hearing it as a sonata that promises to be ragtime. That's not a subtle distinction and I have to trust my readers will understand what I mean.
Now all of that is pretty abstract, I grant. What might it sound like to work with Joplin's musical language in such a way as to make a sonata form using A and B strains from one of his rags? Since all of his work has entered the pubic domain since the centennial of his death (4-1-2017) it's possible to make musical works that show rather than tell what this sonata-form approach to ragtime can potentially sound like. One possible realization of such an approach can sound like this.
The basic idea is that nobody has to change that much about ragtime as a musical language. What is more necessary is to unlearn generations of music theory prescriptions and proscriptions about what you allegedly can and cannot do with the musical material. Ragtime doesn't have to be forced into the Procrustean bed of ideas about sonata forms from the 19th and 20th centuries that have been largely debunked or gently corrected within the 21st century.
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