Monday, April 4, 2011

Day 71: Ragtime!

I tried making a recording of Golliwogg's Cakewalk on Saturday, but it isn't quite polished enough for my taste to post a recording.  Expect to see it posted to Youtube this week, though.

I moved right along into Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin today.  This piece is comprised of 85 measures, of which the first 17 are still solidly in my memory.  The piece is essentially broken down into four parts, each of which repeat themselves.  There is a brief return to the initial measures of the piece after the second section ends, as a bridge to the third and fourth sections.  There isn't a whole lot to talk about with musical notation in this piece, but I still plan on posting a bit of a discussion about that tomorrow.  Ragtime is probably my favorite product of American music.  It was popular in this country and around the world over a hundred years ago and has seen a couple of periods of revival, most notably in the 70's (remember the movie, The Sting?).

I focused right in on measures 19 through 23 today.  I'm taking it a bit slower because I absolutely remember nothing about a majority of this piece, so it is almost like learning from scratch.  Don't ever discount ragtime for a simple genre for the pieces are deceptively complex on a technical level, although not necessarily on a musical level.

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