Miss Dickinson, Meet Mr. Joplin
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Max Morath Introduces Emily Dickinson to Ragtime Music
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or,
Max Morath Introduces Emily Dickinson to Ragtime Music
Let's begin with a definition from Gunther Schuller, who in the early 1970's made classical recordings of ragtime with the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble. In Early Jazz he writes: "Ragtime: A music characterized by syncopated melody over a regularly accented rhythmic accompaniment. In its strictest sense ragtime refers to a music style developed on the piano in the late nineteenth century."(381) In the 1970's ragtime music received a sudden recognition surge when Scott Joplin's rag, "The Entertainer," won an Academy Award as the theme music for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Thus, many people today have heard ragtime's bouncy, jingling melodies and rhythms without really knowing what it is or where it comes from.
Ragtime music grew out of two traditions of Black music, both of which gained popularity in minstrel shows, those "commercial showcase[s] of racist humor" (Waldo, 21) during the years leading up to the 1890's. These were the "coon songs," built on reinforcing racial stereotypes, and the "cakewalk," a dance performed by Black couples to energetic instrumental music. In the late 1880's "Ragtime," bouncing syncopated piano music associated with these two traditions, began to emerge in cities along the Mississippi: New Orleans, with musicians like Ben Harney, Tony Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton; St. Louis, with Tom and Charlie Turpin; and Sedalia, Missouri, where in 1899 John Stark published "Maple Leaf Rag," written by a 31-year-old piano player named Scott Joplin.
Joplin was born in Texas in 1868, the son of newly-freed slaves who were both themselves musicians. Influenced by both parents and by the music he heard in church, young Scott showed early talent. He was exposed to both popular and classical music literature, and while still in his teens moved to St. Louis and from there to Sedalia, where he discovered an active, vibrant musical community at honky-tonks and bars. "The Maple Leaf Rag" was the first of dozens of rags he published. Having studied classical music at Smith College for Negoes in Sedalia, he attempted to move ragtime to a more serious position in American musical consciousness, and in 1911 published a folk opera, Treemonisha. After 1910 Joplin became increasingly ill from the effects of syphillis, and he died in 1917.
Here are three Joplin rags, to which we shall be referring later:
If we listen carefully to the rags, we will discover that each consists of several melodies repeating in patterned sequence. For example, in two of them a sixteen-bar melody -- call it "A" -- is played and immediately repeated; a second one -- "B" -- is played and repeated; and a single iteration of "A" follows. Then two new melodies -- "C" and (natch) "D" -- are arranged in a different logical pattern. All these melodies are syncopated -- that is, stresses in the music occur in unexpected places. The left hand of the pianist is regular, with four steady quarter notes to each measure, but the right hand must play dotted quarters and sixteenths that move the stress off the beat. Finally, if we listen to the chords, we will notice that not all these tunes are in major keys. Some are distinctly minor, and others, despite their bouncy syncopation, are written in mixed modalities that suggest darker moods. Terry Waldo has written: "There is a surface gaiety juxtaposed against an underlying rigidity and sadness.... Good ragtime might be humorous, but it is rarely happy." (59)
Looking particularly at one of the rags, "Eugenia," we can see Joplin working confidently with his form. He begins in the key of B-flat. After a short introduction, he presents a 16-bar melody line ("A") and repeats it. Then he introduces a second theme, also 16-bars ("B"), which he repeats, and then he reiterates "A" once. Then the key changes to E-flat, and he alternates two new 16-bar melodies ("C" and "D") in the pattern C-D-C-D-C. Notice that "D" is distinctly minor. Here's the breakdown of "Eugenia" with approximate times for the MIDI rendition above:
0:00-0:05
Max Morath and Emily Dickinson
Max Morath is a present-day ragtime performer. In the 1960's he produced The Ragtime Era, a series for National Educational Television (NET), the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting System. Ever since, he has been arranging and performing ragtime on stages and broadcast media all over the country. In the 1970's he helped move the form into the classical arena, where it came under the batons of such conductors as Joshua Rifkin and Gunther Schuller. And somewhere along the line, Morath became interested in setting Emily Dickinson's tight, rhythmic, dense poems against the tight, rhythmic dense music of ragtime.
In his composition "In Separate Rooms (An American Song Cycle)" Morath chose three Dickinson poems, "I Never Saw a Moor," "I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose," and "If You Were Coming in the Fall." These he matched each with a rag tune from an interior melody of one of the rags above. For anyone interested, the melodies Morath has chosen occur in the "Palmleaf" at1:30, in "Eugenia" at 2:00, and in "Paragon" at 2:05. Here are the poems:
Poetry used by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
Morath wisely decided not to try to fit Dickinson's poems to the actual tunes of the rags. Instead, he wrote a melody for each one that would act as a sort of legato counterpoint to the rag. The melodies certainly make use of ragtime syncopation, but they are nonetheless smoother than the accompaniment bouncing along underneath them. The three are meant to be played sequentially in a single performance; however, because of the difficulty of creating long sound files for the Internet, they appear here as three separate files. Morath repeats the first poem at the end of the cycle, so in order to hear the cycle as he intended it, we must play them A-B-C-A. We can hear Morath himself playing the piano, and his singer/actress daughter, Kathy Morath, singing the poems:
For information regarding performance rights, contact:
Morath writes, "I composed these pieces for a concert in Sedalia, Mo., under the auspices of the Scott Joplin Festival, held there every June for the last few years. (Joplin's first publication was in Sedalia in 1899.) The medley was included in a concert by myself and Ann Fennessy, soprano, entitled 'The Legacy of Scott Joplin'.... I think Mr. Travis Rivers' [a reviewer] comment is quite accurate -- the Dickinson melodies 'floated over' the rags. They are NOT an attempt to set Dickinson to rags themselves. I think that would be impossible, or impossibly contrived. I'll admit to a fanciful thought that triggered this work. I have always 'heard' legato melodies within rags, especially Joplin's rags. I wondered what he might have written if he could have collaborated with some late-19th-century American poets. With Dickinson the dates work -- Joplin, born 1868, and her work published, I believe, in 1890, 1891, and 1896." (Lowenberg, 74)
Max Morath at the piano in the studio
When listening to Morath's arrangements, we may notice that he plays the rags more slowly than the MIDI versions. This tempo is surely partly the result of setting his "floating" melody over the rags. He doesn't want to race through Dickinson's words. However, there's another reason, too. Scott Joplin was very concerned with the tempo of his music, and on many of his published scores he inserted a warning inscribed within a rectangle like the ones on cigarette packages today:
Morath's choice of poems for this cycle is interesting. "My reasons for picking these particular poems in "In Separate Rooms: were purely subjective. I'm certainly no ED expert, altho like so many of us, I have always been drawn to her simplicity and spirituality. And I must say that many of her poems seem like song lyrics -- almost as if she had written hundreds of little songs, and then thrown away the music." (letter, July 18, 1991)
Despite the appearance of "simplicity and spirituality" in these poems, running just beneath them is a very real tension, and it hovers between the surface of faith and the depths of doubt, asking questions about God and the afterlife, about the natural world, about love and human relationship. "I Never Saw a Moor" begins as if it wants to praise the power of imagination: to paraphrase the first stanza, though I've never seen these places, I know what they look like. The second stanza, however, reveals that this statement is offered only as an analogy; the speaker is trying to convice someone that God and Heaven can be known imaginatively, just as a reader of Bronte can know the moors. With Dickinson, the person to be convinced of the power of faith is surely the poet herself, who in many other poems reveals that she was tortured with questions about the reality of God and Heaven. Rather than an expression of quiet faith, then, this poem reads like an attempt to overcome doubt.
Lack of sure knowlege informs "I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose" as well. The speaker understands the sunrise, and can describe it beautifully. However, the sun's departure is less clear -- "how he set, I know not." This poem can be read as a meditation on the limits of experience, both in the natural world, and -- metaphorically, with the passage of day representing the passage of a lifetime -- in the course of human existence. I can explain how the the beginning happens, says the speaker, but I can't tell you much about the ending.
The last poem contains the most explicit statement of doubt in the three. The speaker is thinking about a relationship with an absent friend or lover. She considers strategies to help her await the arrival of her beloved over successively longer periods of time: a season, a year, centuries, eternity. Governing each stanza and each possibility of arrival is the conditional "if." At first the question seems to be, when will the speaker's lover show up? Later it seems to be, will he ever arrive at all? In fact, in the final stanza the question becomes not when the beloved will arrive, nor even if he will arrive, but whether (speaking of their lives) "yours and mine should be" (be what? be together? be united? something like, surely). Although some readers might disagree, we can recognize the possibility of a spiritual reading for this poem, as we did with the others. Dickinson could easily be meditating about the Second Coming, with the "you," the beloved, being Christ, who at the Last Judgment is to rise from from death. If so, this reading fits readily into her familiar concern of agnosticism and spiritual ambivalence.
Such uncertainty and discomfort becomes ragtime music wonderfully well. We remember Terry Waldo's remark, "Good ragtime might be humorous, but it is rarely happy." The tension between belief and doubt creates brilliant images of moors and seas, of steeples and stiles, of months in shawls and lives of rind; but it also suggests sobering meditations as well. Indeed Max Morath's whole project creates a special tension of its own. Imagine Emily Dickinson, the Myth of Amherst, dressed all in white and cozied up to an upright piano in a St. Louis honky-tonk, Scott Joplin in gartered shirt-sleeves and a derby hat at the keyboard beside her. His fingers start to dance over the keys; she opens her throat to sing.
You can't picture it? Well, look just below. Now click on the music again. And listen.
(If you need to reopen one or all of these sound files, click here to return to their links above.)
Lowenberg, Carlton. Musicians Wrestle Everywhere: Emily Dickinson and Music. Berkeley, California. 1992.
Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Early Development. New York. 1968.
Waldo, Terry. This is Ragtime. New York. 1976.
All text on this page ©John Gould, 1998
Page last modified 4/23/05.
Scott Joplin
(1903, MIDI sequence by Warren Trachtman)
"Eugenia"
(1905, MIDI sequence by Dave Frank)
(1909, MIDI sequence by Mary Haley)
Listening to Ragtime
Melody
Introduction (in B-flat)
A, A
B, B
A
C (key change, E-flat)
D (minor)
C
D (minor)
C
Time of play
0:05-0:50
0:50-1:35
1:35-2:00
2:00-2:25
2:25-2:45
2:45-3:10
3:10-3:30
3:30-3:50
Max Morath
"I Never Saw a Moor"
("Palm Leaf")
(0:53, mp3 file)
"I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose"
("Eugenia")
(1:48, mp3 file)
"If You Were Coming in the Fall"
("Paragon")
(2:04, mp3 file)
Deganawidah Music - BMI, 3334 Crescent St., Astoria, NY 11106
E-mail: aradiagroup@yahoo.com
International: BMG Music Publishing Intl.
Sources:
Blesh, Rudi, and Janis, Harriet. They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music.. New York. 1971.
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