About Michael Mathew
I became a devotee of ragtime (but alas never a pianist) when as a teenager I heard the Graeme Bell band play at the Sydney Town Hall in the early 1950’s. Studies, family and career dominated my life until the early 1990’s when I started to acquire ragtime LPs and later CDs, and when I found on the internet that there were more tunes than I had ever imagined. After I had downloaded the MIDI renditions by all the then well-known sequencers, players and piano roll transcribers I made a list of them – it was probably no more than 1,500 tunes.
Messaging to some of those creators flushed out lists of tunes they were working on, and Warren Trachtman shared with me a listing that Paul Wilson had made based on the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection and several ragtime recording and sheet music listings. This became the starting point of A RAGTIME COMPENDIUM (and I can never thank Paul sufficiently for his work), but it would not have gone much further had I not been introduced (by email) to Californian Tom Brier, who volunteered to help and share his extensive data bases (and did so for over 15 years until his awful accident).
Over 20 years there have been many University libraries, composers, collectors and enthusiasts who have shared their knowledge or data base with those working on A RAGTIME COMPENDIUM at the time (and many of these are credited at the end of these notes). There have also been helpers who regularly searched the web for new or updated pages that would enhance our material. It is not finished, and it never will be, but I’d like to think it was a useful contribution to the ragtime community.
Tom Brier and I had different approaches – mine as I indicated started with renditions whereas Tom was a substantive collector of sheet music – but we settled on the importance of titles, subtitles, composers, lyricists, publishers and dates as validated from the copyright page of sheet music wherever possible and the use of multiple sources whenever practicable. Some of this evidence is rare and tunes for which the only source cited is Tom’s own collection or a University library reflect this.
Background and Scope
The original aim of this compendium was to create a listing of all “ragtime’ titles, with details of their composers, lyricists, years of copyright (or composition) and original publisher and also to indicate where MIDIs of particular titles could be found on the web. The rationale for only including MIDIs were chosen at the time because that was where I started and because of storage volumes if we adopted MP3’s, but we have relented slightly on that in view of the enormous output on YouTube by ragtimedorianhenry.
The listing is specifically “ragtime” rather than “rags”. A discussion on what constitutes “ragtime” could fill several web pages. Eminent musicologists have long differed on a definition of a rag or of ragtime, yet clearly there has to be some criteria for this Compendium. Some of the existing definitions exclude music not specifically composed for the piano, and others set a specific structure (e.g. AABBACC). As a generalisation the comment that the tune must, if played on a piano, have "syncopation in one hand and a steady rhythm in the other" seems a best fit for what we have chosen to include, although "we know it when we hear it" has prevailed in some cases. Traditionally in publications the emphasis has been on works written for piano, with the exclusion of such items as songs, guitar pieces and trombone smears. But ragtime has diverse roots and we have endeavoured to include all items that are "significantly syncopated" - as a result we have included fiddle tunes, songs and guitar rags that many purists would reject.
Allan Sutton, in his "Cakewalks, Rags and Novelties" discography has a much tighter definition of ragtime (Introduction, p. 1). His significant work has been a confirmatory source for many titles, and has helped add titles and augment detail on others, but he excludes songs, works that do not conform to a relatively tight pattern and works not known to have been recorded in his time period (1894-1930). The interests and efforts of the many contributors of material (with very diverse interests) have somewhat defined the musical genres embraced, and some tunes from the classical repertoire (e.g. Gottschalk) that are deemed to fit "well" (perhaps by me alone) have been included.
To most people ragtime equates with Scott Joplin, and hence anything by Scott Joplin is ragtime. But that is not true as Joplin, like so many composers, wrote in many genres - rag, waltz, march, song and even an opera (Treemonisha). I doubt ARC contains all the tunes by any particular composer except those of the acknowledged ragtime seminal composer Scott Joplin. On the other hand it contains many entries for composers who only ever composed one ragtime piece, and maybe only ever one piece. The scene has been unduly complicated by the advent of the web which makes it possible for people to “publish” material which has no need to be judged as being either ragtime or of reasonable quality by knowledgeable colleagues.
We are sadly aware that there are some spurious entries, mainly ones where there are identical (or almost identical) titles and for one the composer listed is actually only an arranger. But with no evidence to prove this we have felt obliged to treat these as two tunes, at least until someone can prove otherwise. It is interesting how often only one title can be found for a particular composer, and how, as described elsewhere, several of the women composers seemed to cease composing when they married.
In this, the final revision with which I will manage, there has been a lot of effort put into the Pre-1971 segment (and almost none put into the Post-1970 segment) since this is the period for which more robust evidence is available, and for which more keeps coming onto the web. With the web nowadays being the ”publishing” medium, one can scarcely keep up with new compositions.
An important aspect of this revision is that Mississippi State University provided an inventory of their recent bequest of the Janice Cleary sheet music collection. It is nearly 50,000 sheets of which roughly one eighth transpired to be ragtime. This has led to significant strengthening of some source entries and some new entries, although sadly until that collection is scanned there may remain unrecognized ragtime treasures.
Special Thanks
A RAGTIME COMPENDIUM would not exist without the help of many contributors, the bulk of whom are acknowledged in Table 6. But there are a few that have to be mentioned here (in alphabetical order):
- Dr David Beattie, a fellow Australian, who has been a helper in most revisions, and without whose help this project would have ceased long ago
- Dorian Benard (ragtimedorianhenry) for access to his research and for validating titles
- Tom Brier, whose assistance from almost day one was nothing short of exceptional, and for whom we hope for a full recovery from his nasty car accident in 2016
- John Cowles for MIDIs and data from his eBay site
- Rob Crausaz, whose substantial efforts have been greatly appreciated, especially as a major contributor to this revision
- Benjamin Intartaglia, for consistent research on European ragtime
- Mississippi State University for their exceptional help over 15 years (and other Universities have been great helpers too)
- Dr James Pitt-Payne and Veda J. Meyer-Castens for James’ voluminous MIDI output and Veda’s help in tracking them
- Luigi Ranalli, who edited Version 6 and was an early anchor
- Lothar van der Sluijs who has searched Dutch and other European markets for old scores and has aided in validating titles
- Dr Paul Wilson, whose data base was the starting point
Michael Mathew
Melbourne, Australia
