some belated thoughts on Ethan Iverson on Nikolai Kapustin, fleshing out some potential ideas that were implicit in Iverson's brief remarks

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/clarinet-sonata

I’m gonna dive into the weeds:

 

One name people have mentioned to me in connection with Playfair Sonatas is Claude Bolling, who had the big crossover hit Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. While Bolling was obviously a talent, he is also the quintessential “classical composer trying too hard to be jazzy.” There is not much of an organizing voice there other than pastiche.

 

I’m not really a huge fan of Nicolai Kapustin, either, which is sort of like written-out Oscar Peterson for virtuoso pianists. God bless everyone who does that stuff, for it is certainly hard to do, but it is decidedly conservative.

…

Bolling, Kapustin, and Batiste go straight in with no hesitation. But hesitation is warranted. There’s more to aesthetics than just getting over with the audience. There should be a deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms.

 

In Playfair Sonatas, the dedicatees of the slow movements are Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Joe Wilder, and Paul Desmond. They all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level. For those six, varied forms of sophistication such as irony, nonchalance, theatre, and stubbornness meet in the subconscious on the way to a finished personal aesthetic.

…

 

What that deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms might be could be the subject of any number of books, couldn’t it?

 

But what does Iverson mean by writing that Claude Bolling or Nikolai Kapustin “go straight in with no hesitation”.  Hesitation regarding what?  What hesitation about “what” is warranted?  Now that Bley, Rudd, Coleman, Dolphy, Wilder and Desmond all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level is probably true but isn’t there a conundrum in that framing?  Why are Americans stuck with combining European and African idioms, or are they stuck with just these two options?  Lou Harrison wasn’t stuck with just those two options! 

 

Saying that Bolling and Kapustin didn’t quite pull off the elusive jazz/classical synthesis might be Captain Obvious but I have not seen anyone attempt to make a full or clear argument as to why they haven’t pulled that off.  This is really a case where you have to prove the negative, you have to explain what they did wrong.   The trouble is that in the history of jazz and classical fusion attempts it would seem as though mostly what we have our failures in a realm where many a partisan of jazz and classical would rhetorically ask what anyone would even guess “success” could even mean. 

 

I don’t think the problem with written-out Oscar Peterson is that it is “decidedly conservative”.  Was Oscar Peterson decidedly conservative? What does it mean to even say “conservative” about Peterson’s style if Kapustin overtly emulates it? Is it actually bad to do so? 

 

I think there is an intuition that something is off in Kapustin’s nods to Peterson but I would suggest, guitarist though I be and guitarist more steeped in classical guitar literature that I am, that the problem with Kapustin’s emulation of Oscar Peterson’s style is in the nature of Peterson’s style; Peterson’s style is anywhere between two, three or even four removes from the American songbook.  Think of the songs in the songbook as the bones in the skeleton and Peterson’s interpretations as sinew, gut, muscle, and skin.  Peterson’s work is the finished house and Kapustin copies the finished house without appraising the foundation. 

 

This is a problem with and within jazz itself.  Peterson’s embellishment and ornamentation of songbook standards is already multiple levels of remove from the bare-bones songs.  When Oscar Peterson played “Summertime” we know that he played Gershwin. We’ve heard the Gershwin hundreds or thousands of times in our lives, maybe, if we live in the United States and have heard the standards.  Someone like Peterson could take all the liberties he took because of the shared songbook.

 

The problem with Kapustin’s piano sonatas, which I don’t mind hearing whenever I’m hearing them but can hardly ever remember two or three days afterward, is that what Kapustin did is as if he transcribed Peterson’s vocabulary toward the end of writing piano sonatas but … how clearly can you sing the foundational tunes of any of the themes in Kapustin’s nineteen piano sonatas?  Another matter could be that if Kapustin has a sonata exposition that blazes away in a single key then how would you even recognize when one theme ends and another beings within all those fiery running scales?

 

Haydn used to complain of his contemporaries, as Richard Taruskin occasionally noted, that there were too many folks jamming too many ideas into their pieces.  Haydn didn’t say the ideas were bad ideas, just that there were too many of them.  Too many ideas and the audience won’t remember the piece long enough or well enough for it to touch their hearts.  The observation that music and memory are intertwined is an ancient one and it’s one of the first and most obvious points broached in Augustine’s De Musica. For music to touch your heart you have to be able to hear it and remember it.  At the risk of attempting to intuit what Iverson’s apparent unhappiness with Nikolai Kapustin’s post-Petersonian bravura is really pointing toward is this, Kapustin picked up the vocabulary as a finished idiom better than he went back behind that idiom to firmly grasp what Peterson was several layers of remove from; Kapustin faltered at the point of thematic presentation and thematic differentiation across his large-scale forms.

 

I’ve already implied the nature of thematic presentation. You need to be able to recognize when you’re hearing a theme.  Kapustin’s piano sonatas can be full of dramatic flourishes that can promise that “something is coming! A theme is on its way!”  Well, when does it show up?  Iverson has written that many classical musicians can’t sing Armstrong solos but that is itself too many removes from the real issue, which is that people should know the songs Armstrong performed and if they get around to those solos that’s for a later stage in development.  Thematic presentation is the start of “Jumpin’ Pumpkins” or the head tune of “`Round Midnight” and not all those legendary solos.  Kapustin was scrupulous about replicating the effect of all the spur-of-the-moment improvisational embellishments but the price was creating a cycle of piano sonatas where each sonata could occasionally feel like it’s part of a big mega-sonata in an installment plan, which is roughly how Kyle Gann described the piano sonatas of Medtner.  Ironically, and it’s a good thing Kapustin isn’t with us to see me write this, Kapustin’s piano sonatas can resemble those of Medtner’s by dint of having a vibe so pervasive it blurs the identity of each of his piano sonatas. Kapustin really didn’t like Medtner’s piano music as I recall. 

 

As for thematic differentiation, this would be where Kapustin blasting through an exposition without any clear key changes can present a problem but the more basic concern I have had is he seemed reluctant to slow down enough to let his themes be themes.  Kapustin didn’t study composition at a formal level. It comes across. In the way his piano sonatas are full of flourish but can be muddled on structural clarity.  Scott Joplin mastered thematic presentation and differentiation even if he ran with AABBACCDD so much it became a cliché to talk about the structure of a Joplin rag as distinct from any and every other kind of rag.  His contemporaries James Scott and Joseph Lamb were able and willing to end rags with their A and B strains, which I think was a brilliant move on their part that I sometimes wish Joplin did more in his work. 

 

Don’t go back to Peterson without going back to ragtime and blues.  The problem isn’t with emulating Peterson but with not picking up blues and ragtime.  The hesitation that Iverson wrote about is, if I may suggest this, an intuition that nobody can just go and adapt a Petersonian idiom to sonatas and fugues without getting a firm grasp of what foundation Peterson was building on.

 

Paradoxically, I find I mainly like Kapustin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.  The sheer demands of writing a fugue and the centuries of thematic/linear concentration the tradition demands forced Kapustin to be clearer.  Whether or not his cycle of preludes and fugues “makes it” into the repertoire canon or the academic canon remains to be seen but it’s the more effective work in Kapustin’s body of work for me than his piano sonatas because there’s no getting around Bach, for instance.  There’s no getting around Shostakovich, either. 

 

But jazz and classical composers who want to experiment with a jazz/classical synthesis need to trust in the possibilities latent within the simplicity of the materials.  You should be able to write a big sonata form using just themes from a Scott Joplin, James Scott or Joseph Lamb rag.  You could probably do it with something by May Aufderheide, for that matter.  You should be able to take a blues by Charley Patton or John Lee Hooker or Fred McDowell and have that be enough to make yourself a sonata form.  The same goes for Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, I think the idea is clear enough at this point. 

 

Bach began the Goldberg Variations with a theme in which you never have more than two notes being actively played at any point in the initial presentation of the theme.  Jazz/classical fusion experiments should be able to start that bare-bones.  You don’t need jazz chords. You probably don’t even need jazz rhythm initially, because how many of the jazz standards from the great American songbook actually started off as jazz standards? You could go with a ragtime/Mississippi John Hurt take on “Just as I Am” and not even attempt to create some new theme whole-cloth.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this “sampling” was part of the art of inventio in rhetoric.

There's also no long-term path to that capacity for choosing that doesn't go through a long circuitous journey into the mountain range of theory. If we want to chart a path forward in which jazz and classical synthesis has some chance to "work" we don't go back to Peterson, we don't even go back to Armstrong, we go back further to Scott Joplin and James Scott and to shape-note hymns and ragging the classics.  There's a lifetime's worth of possibilities just exploring how to take themes from Joplin's rags (or Lamb's or Scott's) and making those themes the building blocks of piano sonatas.  Somebody could take themes from Heliotrope Bouquet and make them the basis for a piano sonata, especially now that all of Joplin's work has passed pretty firmly into the public domain.  Take themes from Treemonisha and make a piano sonata out of that.  Play with strains of The Entertainer in parallel minor or flip the passages upside down to see how they sound.

Armstrong, even, is too far out into the history of jazz.  The most promising point at which a potential jazz/classical synthesis could start to be explored seems like ragtime because it's the style that existed before there even was jazz.

Anyone who can make a piano sonata or even a fugue in the style of Scott Joplin could probably move on to exemplars farther along into the history of jazz.  And if we go by Joplin's School of Ragtime nothing that jazz performers, fans or historians call "swing" is even necessary. No amount of swing in the world is going to salvage a tune that doesn't stick in your memory sung or played without it. 

Some thoughts for a fairly typical rainy Seattle evening. 

POSTSCRIPT 2-26-2025

I've seen Iverson write in a few places that he thinks most theory is bunk but how is he ever going to explain what's wrong with the actual works of Bolling or Kapustin if he doesn't, at some point, resort to music theory?  Absent a set of theories and aesthetic paradigms that actually get explained we're stuck with a situation like the one in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season one, with Rarity asking Rainbow Dash what she meant by saying "It needs to be about 20% cooler".  Particularly in light of ultimately negative appraisals of jazz/classical fusions the Rainbow Dash useless axiom couldn't possibly be more apt!

some reservations about Ethan Iverson's suggestion that symphonic musicians should learn how to play blues and a beat

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-468-identity-politics-postmortem

…

On the musical front, let me take this time of liberal bloodletting to mention Florence Price. In the woke era, the classical establishment decided that elevating this long dead black woman composer would expiate their sins.

 

Price’s ragtime-ish piece “Nimble Feet” has had new reach; I just counted 40 performances uploaded to YouTube in the last few years. The piece is attractive although a bit bland. However, that’s not my problem, for a basic argument for diversity is easy to understand. What I find so frustrating is that none of the performers I listened to treated “Nimble Feet” like common practice black music, meaning a situation where the pulse is ruthlessly even and the syncopations work in African opposition to the ground rhythm. Rather, the performances are full of a romantic European attitude.

 

Going one step further: Florence Price took the gatekeepers off the hook. The gatekeepers could fund the performance of an old Price symphony (or a new Concerto in Memoriam George Floyd or whatever), get the social justice kudos at the gala, then go home and watch their stock index go up. Meanwhile, nothing about common practice black music was learned within classical institutions.

 

Our symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat! It’s not that hard! If you can learn to play Mahler, you can learn to play the basic blues and a basic beat. Once again, this was the point of my New York Times essay about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece.”

…

Related post: Philip Ewell’s musicological book from 2023 is peak woke, and I found plenty to criticize.

 

The question begged in Iverson’s comment is why “symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat”? 

 

What does Iverson really mean by common practice black music?  Which blacks?  In the United States?  In Kenya?  In Indonesia? In Ghana? I pick Kenya and Ghana non-randomly because I’ve benefited greatly from books by Christian pastors and theologians from Ghana and a few of my friends in my college years were fellow Christians from Kenya.  I can intuit what Iverson really means by common practice black music but if I intuit correctly then Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is emphatically not part of that common practice black music.  There are a variety of questions begged behind two claims and I don’t consider it hair-splitting to ask what assumptions have gone into the claims.

 

What does Iverson think symphonic musicians have to gain from learning to play blues and a beat?  The ability to improvise? Well, no, they won’t learn anything about improvisation from blues and a beat that didn’t exist in the centuries of figured bass usage or in the Italian partimento practices that span centuries.   Blue notes? If by blue notes we mean notes that can only be found “between the keys”, well,  Anton Reicha was extolling the use of quarter-tones in his Treatise on Melody back around 1810.  False relations where G natural and G sharp show up at the same time or in close temporal proximity?  Those show up in English liturgical music from around the time of Tallis and Byrd.  The trouble is that you could pick almost any random element Iverson might potentially propose symphonic musicians could learn by learning to play blues and a beat and not a single one of those elements, taken in isolation, is something that hasn’t been around within concert music traditions.  Sure, the combination of ingredients in blues is different but there’s a more foundational question that is begged behind the question what is to be gained.

 

Whatever common practice black music Iverson means it is clear that just playing more Florence Price somehow fails to convey the secrets and wisdom contained in common practice black music.  But if Lorence Price, a black woman composer, is bereft of those qualities in such a way that playing her music adds “nothing” whose music would?

 

But which common practice Iverson means leads to another question, whether common practice black music and common practice white music are necessarily different.  We know this isn’t the case when it comes to, say, Christian hymnody.  Thomas Andrew Dorsey made very few changes to “Maitland” when he composed his most famous and justifiably beloved hymn.  This is well-known and gets mentioned by Michael Harris in a book about Dorsey’s Gospel blues legacy.  

 

William T. Dargan wrote about the lining out tradition and showed fairly persuasively that the lining out tradition began in the seventeenth century in low Anglican parishes where literacy was low.  The lining out tradition among poor English and Scottish parishes was so commonplace that the tradition of lining out metrical psalmody migrated to the American colonies. There it flourished for a time until nascent black American churches used it and higher brows contended that white churches should switch to shape-note hymnody so as not to have the same kind of lined out metrical psalmody and Dr. Watts idioms in common with their black churchgoing contemporaries.  At different stages in the American experiment white and black churches in the low liturgical scenes had so much in common there were edicts against the shared vernacular.  There have been periods among white and black communities where there were shared musical practices and yet one side or another decided that for the sake of some kind of racial differentiation or pursuit of distinction commonalities needed to be de-emphasized or a tradition needed to be overtly sidelined. 

 

While in predominantly white churches in the 1970s through 1990s there are accounts of worship wars it might be precisely on this topic of Christian battles over what liturgical music is or isn’t suitable that we learn these battles happen in age after age.  In the United States in the early 20^th century a case can be made that was in black churches in what religion scholars would probably call the mainline in which worship wars were fought in the early 20^th century.  You won’t get a very fair take on the situation Richard Allen faced in founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church if you only read something like Michael Harris’ book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the birth of Gospel blues.

 

On the other hand if you read Mark Burford’s magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field you will learn something, the triumph of Gospel blues and the whoop-it-up Gospel shouter singers was so complete that figures among black classical music who openly expressed reservations about this new popular direction in black American church music were functionally sidelined.  William Levi Dawson was doubtful about the new direction because it would pave the way for pastors and church music directors to just run with the least trained and least talented musicians who knew how to work crowds.  But were those reservations informed by Eurocentric highbrow pretenses?  You could choose to read Singing Like Germans that way. 

 

But the salient point I am trying to make here is that people choosing to reject entire bodies of music in the interest of preserving a perceived racial distinction goes in every direction.  One of my personal reservations about Ewell’s book was that he wrote as though the erasure of BIPOC composers within classical music were done by white theorists.  Doubtless this would be the majority pattern, I surmise, but Mark Burford’s work suggests another possibility, that the triumph pf black popular musical styles entailed a parallel rejection of musical styles and forms that were construed as too Euro-aspirant.  In other words, if Burford’s observation that men like William Levi Dawson had reservations about nascent Gospel blues as the purview of musical hacks it’s not a foregone conclusion that blues and ragtime and jazz were all there is or was to a common practice black music.   The violin works of Joseph Boulougne will be sidelined if those whose idea of black music is Armstrong and Davis keep calling the shots just as much as it will be sidelined if people of the cult of Beethoven keep doing their thing.  Classical music by black composers may have been sidelined by black communities choosing to stop backing composers of symphonic and operatic music as by white hostility. 

 

The triumph of blues and jazz as “the” common practice black music may be an overlooked part of the failure of Florence Price’s music to have gotten more traction.  It’s not that her work is badly made it’s that we’ve already got Scott Joplin and I just think it's patently obvious Scott Joplin’s music is more memorable than the music of Florence Price. I recall Iverson had a few words about Harrison for the centennial of the composer’s birth but I don’t recall a similar post that same year observing the centennial of Scott Joplin’s death.  Harrison’s music for guitar using just intonation octatonic scales is fun and I recommend you give it a listen.  That said, is there some kind of tell in Iverson having not written much about Joplin’s death and his influence back in 2017?  What was it about Harrison that got a post but not the King of Ragtime? 

 

Since I’m on the matter of ragtime now might be a time to ask whether or not a common practice is actually an accurate handling of a musical style.  Jazz pianists may say you ought to play rags with swing.  I don’t recall Joplin ever mentioning swing in his School of Ragtime.  For ragtime composed and published before the Jazz Age it’s not a given that you should swing the sixteenth note or any note values.  We know that Scott Joplin’s contemporary Joseph Lamb did not exactly play with swing. There’s nothing in Joplin’s School of Ragtime to suggest swing was a concept to apply to his music. “Play slowly until you catch the swing” is not proof that “swing” as jazz players define it was what was meant. Joplin elsewhere said that Exercise No. 2 would be screwed up by pianists who liked to vamp.  When a jazz pianist says that ragtime should be played with swing it’s okay to be skeptical, especially if you’re familiar with the primary sources (Joplin and Scott and not any jazz musicians from 1917 onward who played Joplin). 

 

Let’s say symphonic musicians would benefit from learning to play blues and a beat.  Should blues players be expected to know how to handle a partimento exercise, a figured bass or writing a fugue with triple counterpoint? Dismissing a blues guitarist for not playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions would be obviously dubious and yet Iverson’s case, as he’s made it, simply flips a script. Iverson’s suggestion is simply saying their music would be better if it took my music more seriously and were informed more by the musical values of my music.  But hasn’t this been precisely the script used by symphonic musicians to cast aspersion on popular music made by black American musicians? How is flipping the script rejecting the script?

 

Ethan Iverson’s prescription is very simple, “Their music would be better if they learned to play my music.” If he means that pop and classical could benefit from synergistic interaction and affection, I agree. If that’s not what he actually meant his prescription risks being, dare I say it, a bit Roger Scrutonish.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are times when Iverson writes about American popular music in a way that can read as if he’s nudging and winking to fellow initiates about the things you could only see if you were part of some mystery cult.  Take these excerpts, which again touch on the recent work of scholars to highlight the work of Florence Price. These comments from Iverson’s writing about Philip Ewell’s book:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell

…

Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book; they know that trying to explain some basics about the mechanism to the committee is casting pearls before swine. A whole lot of college professors need to prove that they are worthy of receiving a few secrets before any of this gets much better.

 

The road for respect is long. Sometimes it feels like we take two steps backward after one step forward. The last decade has seen the elevation of minor romantic symphonist Florence Price to something like sainthood in the classical music academy. The academy thinks it is paying off some dues, but those dues are still waiting to be paid. Celebrating Florence Price offers little currency in the actual fight against racism down in the subconscious where it really matters.

I strongly doubt that any of Price’s recent advocates can sing one Louis Armstrong solo.

In his book, Ewell discusses Price, of course, but the few pages on jazz are an afterthought. Indeed, nowhere in On Music Theory does Ewell mention African-influenced rhythm as a theoretical organizing principle.

…

For the violinists and the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler. Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the taking, for there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother Africa. And this also might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor play a bit of drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.

 

Knowing basic jazz drums is a quick fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the room, an entry-level command of the drum set would unlock new forms of compositional creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from the best and the brightest if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as they understood notation?

 Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book, huh?  So why teach it? Worthy of receiving the secrets?  Yeah, that resembles a gnostic cult!  To whom are the dues to be paid and how does Iverson know for certain the dues are outstanding?  To whom are the dues due to be paid?  Violinists and conductors should play jazz drums?  

This extended excerpt I've quoted is a more overt form of “their music would be more legitimate if they took my music seriously.” It’s in these kinds of paragraphs that Iverson comes off as a flipped script to the paternalism of Roger Scruton.  This time around it's the symphonic musicians who aren't worthy of the raw realness of blues and jazz musicians and not the other way around.  I made this same point in response to Wesley Morris' 1619 Project piece, flipping the script is not the same as rejecting it outright and rejecting the script outright is what we most seem to need. It's as true on the jazz/blues/rock/country/pop side as it is on the classical music/"serious" music side. 

PS 

None of this means I won't be blogging about Iverson's sonatas because I really have been enjoying those lately.  But sometimes Iverson's writing reminds me that practical musicians would do well to take seriously that the theories we think by become all the more harmful if we've never examined them.  As Charles W Mills put it, the theories we least examine that govern our thinking are the ones that most bind us, whether it was in The Racial Contract or Black Rights/White Wrongs escapes me at the moment.  That Ewell's book was not an equivalent to the work of Mills' work in political philosophy with respect to music education doesn't mean I have to take the worst account of Ewell's motives.  I agree with Iverson that the possibilities of a synthesis of classical forms with the vocabularies of American popular music are worth exploring.  I more than agree with that.  It's all the glib potshots he feels obliged or entitled to take along the way that I find off-putting. 

Ethan Hein's Joy to the Modes and a response post featuring Scott Joplin's The Entertainer in parallel minor, you probably have a really great melody on your hands if it can still sound good after modal mutation

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/joy-to-the-modes/

 

Ethan Hein has used “Joy to the World” as a way to demonstrate different modes running from Lydian to Locrian. He points out he’s not the first person to have done this but he has done it better.  I agree.

In his concluding paragraph Ethan wrote the following, “Does this have any musical value beyond music theory teaching?“  In a way the question to ask back is, “Does it have to?” Bit O remember when I was reading Elaine Sisman’s book on Haydn and variation technique I got to thinking about how frequently in 18^th century variation forms the major key theme showed up in parallel minor for at least one of the variations.  Minor key sets of variations have also featured parallel major variations, too, and Hein’s presentation of “Joy to the World” in every diatonic mode reveals just how indestructible the tune is.  

My take-away as a composer and musician is that subjecting your melody to the harshest and most abrupt modal mutations you can think of helps you figure out whether you have a solid melody or not.  If your melodic contour still sounds good in spite of being run through all the modal mutational paces that’s a good sign that you have a versatile tune with a memorable contour.  If you shift into another mode and you find the melody begins to swim a bit then it may be best as a constituent part of some musical thing with other ideas.  

I’ll give you an example off the top of my head, you can take the first two strains of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and play them in C minor and I submit (being the highly biased Scott Joplin fan that I am) that the music will still sound great.

I'll give you an example after the break. I've limited myself to strains A and B and I just whipped this up in the last hour and a half so if it doesn't look so great pardon the made-to-demonstrate-a-concept layout.

Ethan Hein mentions the three diminished seventh chords as "blues", "jazz" and "classical" with a classical guitarist's variation on how the "blues" tonic decoration showed up in Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag

I've been thinking it's been a while since I changed gears back to music and so that's what I'd like to do.  Taking a break from the other field of topics is handy once in a while.  

So Ethan Hein blogged a while back about the three types of diminished chords.  Since my training is more as a classical guitarist and choral singer my take on the three types of diminished chords is unsurprisingly a little different from his.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/the-three-diminished-chords-blues-jazz-and-classical/

But his core observation about whether a fully diminished seventh chord starts from the tonic of a given scale; a non-tonic note in a given scale; or the leading tone of a given scale is still quite useful.  I've seen him allude to how music theorists have dissented when he has regarded enharmonic equivalency as a make or break issue. The former choral singer in me knows why that is but the guitarist in me also doesn't particularly care and I'm about to give a demonstration of how in fully diminished seventh chords enharmonic respellings for ease of score-reading shows up in a masterpiece of American piano repertoire happened consistently.

on Scott Joplin's work being listed in "Piano Scores" at the back of the Dover 2nd edition of The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap

THE CLASSICAL REVOLUTION: THOUGHTS ON NEW MUSIC IN THE 21ST CENTURY

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

JOHN BORSTLAP

DOVER PUBLICATIONS

Copyright (c) 2013, 2017 by John Borstlap

ISBN 9780486814483

ISBN 0486814483

Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History

Edward A Berlin

Originally published by the University of California Press

Copyright (c) 1980, 2002 by Edward A Berlin

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3064-9

King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his era (2nd edition)

Edward A Berlin

Oxford University Press

Copyright (c) Edward A. Berlin 1994, 2016

ISBN 978-0-19-974032-1

ebook ISBN: 978-0-19-024605-1

Ragtime: It's History, Composers, and Music

edited by John Edward Hasse

Copyright (c) 1985 by John Edward Hasse

Schirmer Books

ISBN: 0-02-8716507

ISBN: 0-02-872650-2 (pbk)

It's one of those minor details that would probably not be conspicuous in reviews of the book, but it leapt off the page for me.  In the second edition of John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution there's a list of piano scores, available through Dover, understandably, and among those scores there's the complete piano rags of Scott Joplin (ISBN 0-486-25807-6). 

A century ago ragtime was popular but not entirely well-received.  In the three books listed above by Edward A. Berlin and the one edited by John Edward Haase music historians and scholars of ragtime have noted that a good deal of ragtime in the period from the 1890s emerged from what were known as coon songs.  The lyrics for many of these early coon songs were regarded as vulgar and trafficking in brutal, coarse language that depicted African Americans in egregiously stereotypical ways; the songs had texts that generally discussed violence (particularly with razors) and depicted African Americans as cowardly, shiftless, violent, and/or sexually promiscuous.  Scott Joplin, who aspired to elevate the musical style and form, was known to have said that he believed one of the primary reasons many who might otherwise appreciate ragtime as music could not do so was because of the sheer vulgarity of the lyrics for ragtime songs.

As Edward Berlin and others have noted, ragtime was primarily a song form, despite the fact that we now think of ragtime as an intrinsically piano-driven or piano-dominated body of music.  That Joplin's operatic efforts foundered is known among fans of ragtime, and that Joplin aspired to write music that would be taken seriously is also known.  Yet on the whole ragtime seems to have been regarded as light music (which in many respects it could be taken to be, but with the understanding that it has a modular construction that, as Adorno put it about so much light music, featured works in which any number of modular parts could be exchanged for others without altering the fundamental nature of the popular musical styles).

And yet in the second edition of The Classical Revolution Dover seems to have seen fit to include Scott Joplin’s collected piano rags as part of the "Piano Scores" section of scores you can get from Dover.   What is significant about this?

I would say the significance of ragtime being listed among piano scores published by Dover here in 2018 a century after Scott Joplin's death is that Joplin's work was finally taken seriously as a contribution to what we would now call "serious music", even if Joplin's work might be considered thoroughly light fare compared to Brahms' piano sonatas or piano works by Beethoven or keyboard music by Bach.  That may be the case as standard beliefs within classical music performance and study go, and yet as chroniclers of the lives of Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb have described their relationship, Lamb once said that he has a piece he was working on in which he had a passage with octaves moving in parallel motion that Scott Joplin recommended he revise so as to introduce contrary motion, which Lamb then did.  Joplin was eager to have solid voice-leading and part-writing in his piano music and in work made by friends and associates, it seems. 

Of the thousands of ragtime songs and instrumental works and novelty pieces that were published between the 1890s and 1920s (the period in which ragtime and nascent blues converged with Tin Pan Alley songwriting idioms to become what has since been called jazz) a relatively small subset of those works, mainly from the piano rag literature, has made it into the piano literature. 

Yet during its age of popularity at the turn of the last century ragtime was apparently regarded with a suspicion and alarm that could be compared, with a few caveats, to the contemporary African American popular music idioms known as rap or hip-hop.  In fact it seems that some of the core criticisms of the two genres made by those who are advocates of classical music as delineated by the ideals of German Romanticism and German idealism are not altogether different.  There were those that attempted to argue that to the extent that ragtime had any musical merit it was not necessarily traceable to African American or African influences.  Some even attempted to claim a Bohemian lineage for ragtime.  While the racist invective that underlay such a claim is something Edward Berlin and others have already addressed it may be worth noting in passing that Joseph Lamb did call one of his works "Bohemia", and early ragtime pioneers indicated debt ragtime had to Spanish musical idioms.  Ragtime itself had roots in African American songs but also, it seems, in salon music and "ragging the classics" was a popular activity within the emerging popular style.  Advocates of the music were able to point out that ragtime might introduce higher levels of syncopation than might have appeared in European salon music but that melodic invention was still present. 

A century ago opponents of ragtime would not have imagined that any of the music published under that name would end up in what is today considered the classical music canon.  Joplin himself was known to have regarded many of the lyrics for ragtime songs to be vulgar and an obstacle to appreciation of the musical qualities of the genre, and Joplin is indisputably the most famous composer in the ragtime genre. 

Of course a crucial difference between ragtime a century ago and rap, hip hop and electronic dance music today is the medium of composition.  Ragtime was composed at the piano and on the page (Joplin, it turns out, was regarded as a middling pianist who might compose with paper and pen and sometimes had to learn his compositions after working them out on the page); rap and contemporary dance music and song tend to be worked out in recording studios and using laptops and modern recording technology.  Then again, when the nascent mechanical mass-production music industry began to emerge in the late 19th century one of the primary beneficiaries was the genre now known as ragtime, which mortified advocates of German romantic music and European musical works more generally. 

Whether or not rap, hip hop and associated styles "clean up" in the way that ragtime did, or has, over the last 120 years remains to be seen.  Certainly Joplin's work has made it into the piano canon if Dover has seen fit to publish his works and mention them in the back pages of John Borstlap's second edition of The Classical Revolution.  If a popular dance style that was denigrated as unmusical trash during its age of peak popularity has since worked its way into classical piano repertoire published by Dover in our own time alongside the piano music of Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn then Dover's publishing decision may signal to us that something that began as popular music can eventually make it into the "classical" canon if the level of craft and musicianship is high enough, which, for Scott Joplin, it apparently has, at least in Dover's estimation. 

Which may involve an irony if Lowell H. Shreyer's observation in the Haase edited monograph on ragtime that early ragtime may have primarily evolved in banjo music before migrating to the piano as African Americans gained more access to the larger instrument.  Inter-instrument adaptation of idioms is common enough in the history of music but I mention this element if ragtime's history because Richard Taruskin made a point of noting in the first volume of his Oxford History of Western Music that many developments in written scores could merely constitute the first observable case of something being preserved in a musical score for posterity, but that the music itself could have predated such notation for generations if the musical idiom existed in oral and folk traditions. 

Yet since the habit of "ragging the classics", particularly Mendelssohn, has been attested by Edward Berlin and other authors noted in the books above, the study of ragtime is significant in relationship to the contemporary popular style of rap and hip hop in the sense that ragtime evolved as musicians sampled existing classical works and reinterpreted and revised the rhythmic phrases of existing classical works.  It has been noted of ragtime that the melodic phrases themselves don't have anything so inherently unique as to separate them from salon and march music that was contemporary to ragtime, but that the rhythmic phrasing was what set ragtime apart.

Yet here, too, ragtime in its earliest forms was not as syncopated as it would become in the later 1890s through the 1920s.  Early ragtime had more intra-measure syncopation than cross-measure syncopation and there was very little of what scholars have called "secondary ragtime", a flexible extension of 3+3+2 style patterns within four-measure phrases, or a 3+3+3+3+2+2, for instance.

Joplin died before his Piano Concerto could be completed and the reported manuscript of that work was lost, but between that lost piano concerto and his opera Treemonisha we know he was aspiring to elevate ragtime to the level of serious music.  He died before he could successfully complete that effort and, since his death, ragtime has managed to secure a place in the piano literature but is clearly not regarded as being as substantial as other forms of classical piano music.  But Debussy's cake-walk and the works of other European composers paying tribute to the style suggests that within Joplin's generation the style had become popular enough to have been heard by European composers and taken up in tribute or mockery (which is more how Stravinsky's take on Ragtime can come across). 

A contribution by Max Morath in the Haase monograph notes that although ragtime was initially associated with African American men from red light district music the popularity of the style exploded so quickly that many ragtimes were composed by white women such as May Aufderheide, Adaline Shepherd and Julia Niebergall, though many of those works have not gained the longevity of the rags by what is known as the "Joplin school", specifically the works of Scott Joplin himself, James Scott and Joseph Lamb.  Lamb himself may be seen as an outlier within ragtime since he was an Irish Catholic from the New York era who developed his love of ragtime through studying sheet music and only later befriended Joplin, while historically ragtime is regarded as having evolved more in the St. Louis region.   

As musicians playing ragtime, blues, and Tin Pan Alley songs began to amalgamate these respective styles and forms into what is now known as jazz the age of ragtime became the age of jazz, which received many of the censures from institutional American arts critics that was previously directed at ragtime. For this reason it’s worthwhile to consider, if only in passing in this essay, that there were many heated debates about the musical merits of ragtime, whether it was even “real” music and whether the style could transcend the gutter-level lyrics that were so often associated with the songs that dominated the style. The classic piano rags that we associate with the style today were proportionally a small body of work within the larger popular style and we know from what biographical work has been possible about the lives of Joplin and his associates, at least, that he intended to elevate the style to the level of art music.  Joplin himself managed to be well spoken and spoken well of despite the disdain that was often heaped upon the style of music he was known to compose.  John Sousa was known to have incorporated Joplin’s works into his concert programs.

All of which indicates that within the late 19^th and early 20^th century popular music, published and disseminated as published scores, existed in a continuum with concert music and that these styles mutually influenced each other, a point that was simple enough to observe when Dwight MacDonald wrote his polemical work “Masscult and Midcult”; high art and folk art managed to interact but he claimed that it was with the emergence of masscult and midcult that a fake high art developed from a top-down marketing regime deigned to sell a kitsch form of high art to unsuspecting masses.  MacDonald regarded jazz as a late blooming form of genuine folk music and jazz, as has been established by music historians over the last century, was a musical convergence of a variety of American popular and folk styles that drew upon ragtime.   

What is the significance of this?  Well, let’s turn to John Borstlap’s assertion about what contemporary classical composers of first-rate ability won’t be doing.

The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century
revised and expanded edition
John Borstlap
Dover Publications
Copyright (c) 2013, 2017 by John Borstlap
ISBN 9780486814483
ISBN 0486814483

page 21

... A contemporary composer with the talents of a Beethoven, Mahler, or Debussy will not be found among the "composers" who think that tonality is a superfluous and outdated tool or that they can infuse their work with the drab confections from pop or world music, jazz or film music [emphasis added], without restricting the art form's potential.  Given the immense richness of past achievement, a really great talent will try to emulate, not to destroy or deny it. ...

So what was Debussy doing writing a cake-walk? 

What was Ravel doing making use of gestures that could be found in blues and jazz?  If by some alchemy of sonata form or concerto conventions Ravel can draw upon chords and melodic gestures that might appear in jazz but does not write jazz the alchemy, at least as Borstlap seems to describe it, is the process by which Ravel did not write jazz. If Ravel bothered to include the word “Blues” in the second movement of his second sonata for violin and piano how did he avoid infusing his work with drab confections from pop, world music (since blues was an American rather than a French form of music, after all), or jazz (which, as we’ve been observing here, evolved out of ragtime and other American popular styles). 

If Ravel in his time did not see drawing upon blues and jazz vocabulary as a decision that would restrict the potential of the art form known as classical music then why should we?  Would not emulating the past achievement of Ravel entail the possibility of making use of blues, ragtime, country and other forms of American vernacular and popular music as a way to explore possibilities for sonata forms, fugue and other 18^th century developments of musical syntax and form?  If a cakewalk was good enough for Debussy it was surely also good enough for Scott Joplin who, by all accounts, was a man living in the land where the cake walk dance and the style of ragtime were invented.  If ragtime has gone from being seen as a musical scourge in the eyes of those who saw the Germanic symphonic tradition as the apotheosis of good music to becoming part of a canon of piano literature in the Dover 2^nd edition of John Borstlap’s The Classical Revolution, ragtime seems to have gone from being regarded as a drab confection from popular music (and a prototype of jazz) to being included in Dover’s catalog as part of the immense richness of past achievement.  

One of the core tensions in The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap lays dormant in the gap between his prescribed precepts and prohibitions for contemporary classical composers and the liberties taken by the historical exemplars he invokes.  It can also be found in the distance between the prescription Borstlap has for the present regarding popular music and jazz and the historical process through which ragtime went from being late 19^th century popular music to being 21^st century classical music available through Dover editions.  It is possible the boundaries between high and low musical styles are more permeable in historical terms than Borstlap has allowed them to be in his theoretical proposal about what contemporary composers of classical music should be doing or not doing.

POSTCRIPT

12.10pm

This post was partly inspired by reading Ethan Hein's interaction with a number of people about hip hop as popular music.  While I admit hip hop isn't exactly my favorite style I've been enough of a fan of ragtime in my life to recognize that there are some fascinating parallels between the ragtime debate of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and more recent debates about the musical value or lack thereof in rap, hip hop and electronic dance music.  Since in historical terms the age of ragtime transformed into the age of jazz ragtime's history as popular music that became an accepted genre in the classical piano literature seems pertinent to a couple of things Ethan Hein has been interested in exploring.  

Ragtime exploded in popularity because of manufacturing innovations for pianos in the United States and also because of the advent of player pianos and piano rolls.  The comparison is necessarily an imperfect one but ragtime could be seen as benefiting from what was then new production and publication technology and, as noted above, the "ragging the classics" practice within ragtime could be compared to a more contemporary custom known as sampling.  The number of parallels, imperfect or indirect as they might seem to some, perhaps, between ragtime and rap as genres of popular song, seems worth considering. 

And since pretty much all ragtime that I'm aware of from the Scott Joplin/James Scott/Joseph Lamb school of ragtime is gloriously public domain by now it's ripe for sampling.  

Joshua Rifkin playing, oh surely you know ... :)

Because, well, why wouldn't you tip your hat to one of the greatest ragtimes ever this day?

The Entertainer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hp1Y8R_dCw

Joshua Rifkin plays Gladiolus Rag

I've been particularly partial to this one for years. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQDg2VcgYhI

Scott Joplin's "Frolic of the Bears" from Treemonisha.

Joplin: Treemonisha / Act two - No. 13 Frolic of the bears · Houston Grand Opera Orchestra · Gunther Schuller

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

Because The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag, great as they are, are also too obvious.  :)

You can hear this as part of why Treemonisha didn't go over so well ... and yet also hear it as an example of Joplin striving to move toward a musical language that went beyond the confines of ragtime as known in his day. 

On the possibilities of spatial-temporal correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata forms

An earlier draft of this essay was published on February 28, 2017.  This new draft has been both shortened and given more detailed citation.  This essay is, of course, published to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the death of Scott Joplin, king of the ragtime composers.
***

In my late teens and early twenties I got into ragtime.  While my study of the style was not necessarily deep it was enthusiastic; although I’m a guitarist I studied and practice just enough piano to learn how to play “Maple Leaf Rag” while I was also picking up a few Bach pieces and teaching myself how to play excerpts from Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis.  During those years I made several attempts to compose rags of my own. At length I settled into my primary love, composing for the guitar and for a long time set ragtime aside. 

What I never set aside, however, was the conviction that ragtime and sonata forms ought to be perfectly suited to each other.  Although I was not always very sure how, I took it as given that, in principle, the style of ragtime and various sonata forms could ultimately be synthesized. To paraphrase Iannis Xenakis, the most ambitious forms of interstellar travel that technology may provide for us may not carry us so far as liberation from our mental shackles could.   If I never accepted the shackles of assumptions that ragtime and sonata forms could not mix I would have a lifetime to find out how they could mix.  

One of the gentle warnings Leonard B. Meyer had about musical analysis is that we not forget the distinction between musical analysis as a matter of form and musical analysis as an observation of process.  That these two aspects of musical analysis often overlap does not mean we won't run into trouble if we misdiagnose early on which of these two aspects of analysis will be most relevant to whatever we study.  The kind of modular architectonics that are useful for delineating themes and transitions in a sonata form may be useless in evaluating the contrapuntal processes guiding a fugue, and might even lead us astray.  While linear expansion and development in a fugue "might" give us insights applicable to a sonata form the expectation of a continuously developing thematic economy may run aground in explicitly dance-derived forms, so the way we'd analyze a Bach fugue will be of little help in assessing a rag by Joseph Lamb.   

That said, being thoroughly steeped in both the history and literature of the sonata, as well as the history of ragtime can open up possibilities for the fusion of both idioms that may remain, as yet, under-explored. 

Of course to explore those possibilities we need to establish basic observations that may be made about these idioms.  Rather than attempt to discuss ragtime in terms more suitable for the unfamiliar, I'm simply going to briefly go over the basic outline of the "Joplin" rag as it's commonly described. 

AA BB A CC DD 

Give or take an introduction, any transitions, and a coda, that's the basic formal outline of a rag. 

We know that not every theme will be repeated and there are cases in which a theme that appears earlier may appear again in a modified form.  For instance, the B strain in James Scott's Modesty Rag is recapitulated at the end where the "D" strain would be and it's slightly recomposed.  This example alone should satisfy for the sake of this essay that recapitulating the B group as the final strain in a rag already opens up possibilities for a sonata form cast in a ragtime style. 

For that matter, where the return of the A strain would typically be could very easily be replaced with what in more traditional understandings of sonata form would be the development section.  The syntactic climax of the return of the A material in a ragtime may be spatially displaced to a point later in a ragtime than we might expect it to conventionally appear but the syntactic climax of the reprise would still take place.  If we bear in mind a simple proposal, that the A or B sections do not have to refer to explicit, literal repeats but may stand as a cumulative time-space, then what we'd call the BB section or B section of a ragtime can be the space in which the second (or also third) thematic strains can be introduced with some suitable transitional materials.   

This would be a way of synthesizing ragtime and sonata form in cases where we have sixteen-measure ragtime strains.  Of course this would not be the only way a sonata form in a ragtime style could be composed.  In fact if we were to make use of material more characteristic of early (rather than late) 19th century sonata materials we might find themes are more apt to be as short as eight measures.  If our thematic strains are 12 measures or less then immediate and literal repetition might be ill-advised; it might also be less effective, given the fact that so very often thematic differentiation is a weakness in ragtime compared to other styles.

Any structural repetitions we might plan to introduce that could bridge the conceptual space between a rag and a sonata form would have to lean more toward a conventional understanding of a sonata form than a rag.  Ragtime repetitions are so conventional as to overpower the often ignored conventions of structural repetitions in sonata forms.

This basic adjustment to small-scale sonata form to resemble the style of ragtime is actually not the least bit difficult.  Rather than an AA BB paradigm as we'd expect in ragtime we could substitute a short repeating exposition that would present as AB AB that could fill the commensurate durational space of AA BB. George Rochberg's concept for this, called "time-space" is inelegant and bluntly literal, but it's arguably the best possible term we're looking for.  Corresponding durational time-spaces within sonata forms and ragtime won’t need to be very strict.

Still, generally, if a ragtime strain is conventionally understood to be sixteen measures long and a conventional ragtime has an AABB procession before A returns, then the number of measures in that durational stretch would be sixty-four measures.  This means that if you have a small-scale sonata exposition (something in the zone of forty measures) then you would be able to fulfill the cumulative AABB in a ragtime best with an AB exposition that has an internal structural repeat.  A simple but perhaps necessary observation about sonata forms in the 18th century is to note that the repetitions should be considered structural.  If you keep this in mind then an exposition with two themes can be mapped out as:

exposition repetition  development   recapitulation

A  B           A   B         C                     A  B 

Not coincidentally, what kind of popular form can this resemble?

verse chorus    verse chorus    bridge   verse chorus

In strictly modular, macro-structural terms, the sonata form with a repeating exposition that's observed before the development and recapitulation can be thought of as remarkably similar in its overall concept to a standard pop song format.  

 

There are crucial, substantial differences in thematic developmental economy between a sonata form and a pop song, to be sure, but the differences are not necessarily reducible to a matter of sheer modular form.  Rather, we're looking at a continuum of differences in the realm of procedural development, conventions for thematic differentiation, and expansion of thematic content.  When advocates of high art musical culture dismiss popular music they do not necessarily reject the elegant simplicity of pop music at the level of macro-structural considerations. They're rejecting the rudimentary presentation and repetition of thematic materials without long-form development.

Rejecting the possibility that the musical materials of popular styles can be used within sonata forms depends, in part, on a stereotyped and negative assessment of those materials. However, such a rejection may also be predicated on a stereotyped view of what sonata forms are, and this could be particularly true of those whose ideal sonatas date not from the 18^th century but the 19^th. 

In Style & Music (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Leonard B. Meyer proposed that a key conceptual difference between 18^th and 19^th century approaches to large-scale form consisted in the difference between a “script” and a “plan” (pages 245-246).  A “script” approach to a sonata would not require contrasting thematic groups in the way a “plan” approach to sonata, particularly in the post-Beethoven pedagogy, often required.  With Meyer’s observation in mind, if a 19^th century prescription for the sonata that thematic groups display contrast is abandoned, the lack of strongly contrasting themes within ragtime is no longer inherently incompatible with the syntactic scripts of sonata forms.

In recent scholarship the most extensive case made for understanding 18^th century sonata forms as a range of scripts has been undertaken by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their book Elements of Sonata Theory. Without attempting to summarize their findings or the debates that have surrounded their proposals, the Types 1 through 5 they delineate suggest that we no longer need to think of sonata forms as tethered to the descriptions of 19^th century or even 20^th century pedagogy. We can make use of their concepts of “rotation” and of the expositional and recapitulation spaces to formulate syntheses of ragtime style with sonata forms.  While there are many things that could be said about the concepts they employ the simplest account of their proposed sonata scripts hinges on principles of thematic differentiation.

If we combine Hepokoski and Darcy’s concept of space within sonata forms with George Rochberg’s “time-space” we can propose that the conceptual foundation for a fusion of ragtime style into sonata forms has been established.  The architectural precepts are in place and the question that remains is a practical one, could we demonstrate that it is possible to recompose an existing sonata form in such a way as to generally conform to recognizable rhythmic, harmonic and melodic traits we hear and see in ragtime? 

Yes.  By way of example, we can turn to early 19^th century guitar music.  Anyone who is studied in both ragtime and early 19^th century solo guitar sonatas may already be able to observe the ways in which Giuliani’s second thematic group in his Op. 150 can be quickly transformed into a ragtime strain.  While I have written at length about 19^th century guitar sonatas elsewhere,  there’s always the writerly axiom “Show, don’t tell.

So let’s demonstrate the possibility of rewriting a small sonata form into a ragtime style by way of recomposing Fernando Sor’s Op. 29 etude in E flat into a ragtime style.  [after the break]