2013-02-25
5 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag
The story of music in 50 pieces with Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Howard Ragtime is one of those musical styles that to many people seem to be very slight, really inconsequential, of no import at all, just rather pleasant.
So why is it.
Why has it made it into your list of 50 pieces?
In the later part of the 19th century, the blues and jazz started to grow, apparently out of nowhere, amongst the poorest communities of the southern part of the United States, indeed, ex slave communities.
This music came out of there.
And at that time, if you'd been alive then and you'd been musically knowledgeable, you would probably not know about its existence.
Would you have known that within 50 years, this music would give rise to the most popular music ever conceived on planet earth and would sweep across every culture and every community?
And the seeds of this vast movement of popular music start in America at the very end of the 19th century, amongst the poorest communities, blues and jazz.
Very few of the musicians who created this music, their names are not particularly known in any roll call of famous composers as the originators of this.
Very few of them had formal training, wrote down what they did or claimed what they did as theirs, which is one of the reasons their music was appropriated by other people.
But one of the few pioneers of this form that we can find is Scott Joplin, who was musically trained and could write his music down and could record it and could put a stamp on it and say, hey, I wrote this.
And what is it that we're hearing in this music?
We are hearing syncopation.
And syncopation was the driving force of so much of the music of this period that became popular music.
So this is what playing slightly off the beat?
Yes, the beat doesn't arrive where you expect it to arrive.
And in the gap between your expectation and where it does arrive, it creates a sort of.
And that is the effect of syncopation.
It's what makes us want to get up and down.