Styles of Jazz: Ragtime

Classic Piano Ragtime

Scott Joplin's musical background moved him to develop ragtime into an art music that would be respected as equal to the European-style classics he had learned as a child. Like Johann Strauss and John Phillip Sousa, Scott Joplin gave the popular style of his culture a formal structure, within which the composer could create what became known as classic piano ragtime. This form consisted of four 16-bar sections patterned AA BB A CC DD, combining syncopated melody with a steady, even duple-rhythm (also called boom-chick) accompaniment. Krell's Mississippi Rag was not of this form, instead following a more common structure for band music of the time.

The music publisher John Stark was a great fan of this form and occasionally penned his own rags. Classic Piano Ragtime--ragtime as art music--was the focus of his musical printing. One Stark and Son ad read:

As Pike's Peak to a mole hill, so are our rag classics to the sluch that fills the jobber's bulletins.
As the language of the college graduate in thought and expression to the gibberage of the alley Toot, so are the Stark Rags to the Molly crawl-bottom stuff that is posing under rag names.
This old world rolled around on its axis many long, long years before people learned that it was not flat. Then they wanted to kill the man that discovered it.
...The brightest minds of all civilized countries ... are now grading many of the Stark Rags with the finest musical creations of all time.
They cannot be interpreted at sight. They must be studied and practised slowly, and never played fast at any time.
They are stimulating, and when the player begins to get the notes freely the temptation to increase the tempo is almost irresistable. This must be kept in mind continuously. Slow march time or 100 quarter notes to the minute is about right.
When played properly the Stark Rags are the musical advance thought of this age and America's only creation.
(Stark Music Co., St. Louis, Missouri; from an ad distributed in 1916.)

Later Stark and Son composers included James Scott, Joseph Lamb, and Artie Matthews.