![]() Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan home of the songwriters who dominated popular music, was flourishing.Īfter a few years in clubs and on radio and television in the West and in his native Colorado, Mr. There were newfangled inventions: player pianos, phonographs and nickelodeons. In the 1890s, he said, people heard it in vaudeville houses or just walking around town. Nobody has paid the classic ragtime much attention, because of the attitude that folk music had to come from the hills. “Classic ragtime isn’t the honky-tonk music you hear today. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked. “Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he would explain. ![]() But his mood grew serious - and strangely more engaging - when he paused to tell audiences what they were hearing. Morath played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” and Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag.” In those moments he might have been a vaudeville copycat trading on nostalgia. In a straw boater and sleeve garters, pounding an old upright with a cigar clenched in his teeth, Mr. What emerged was a new form of entertainment that combined showmanship with scholarly commentaries on ragtime itself, on its players and fans, and on the etiquette and tastes of a long-vanished age when horses pulled streetcars and women’s suffrage was still just a dream of the future. He combed libraries, studied piano rolls and old sheet music, consulted historical societies, read antique magazines and talked to folks old enough to recall the work of the ragtime greats and the milestones of their age. He researched the styles and repertoires of its era. Morath fell in love with ragtime’s dreamlike, bittersweet sounds. Morath - after false career starts as a radio announcer, newscaster and actor - found his calling in a fascination with ragtime, the uniquely syncopated or “ragged” style whose heyday had spanned two decades, roughly from 1897 to 1917.Ī college-educated student of both music and history, Mr. Having learned the rudiments of music from his mother, who played a tinkling piano in movie theaters for silent films, Mr. His wife, Diane Fay Skomars, confirmed the death. Max Morath, who stepped out of the 1890s only a lifetime late, and with syncopated piano rhythms and social commentary helped revive the ragtime age on educational television programs, in concert halls and in nightclubs for nearly a half-century, died on Monday at a care facility near his home in Duluth, Minn. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |