Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemRagging the classics: an examination of ragtime in piano compositions by Claude Debussy, Percy Grainger and Igor Stravinsky( 2013)The beginning of the twentieth century, a time marked by constant re-evaluation and invention, saw a new style of music travel from America across the Atlantic into the music halls of Europe. This vernacular music, labelled ragtime and marked by its syncopated rhythms and improvisatory style, was soon highly popular in European societies. This thesis investigates the influence on American ragtime in Europe by exploring engagements with the genre by art music composers. This will be achieved by analysing three ragtime-inspired works, one each by Claude Debussy, Percy Grainger and Igor Stravinsky. It will deal with music composed specifically for the piano as this instrument was pivotal to the development and integration of ragtime in both America and Europe. The thesis is divided into three chapters arranged chronologically, each providing a contextual background followed by an analysis of a particular ragtime-inspired work. Chapter One investigates the emergence of ragtime in America and its emigration to Europe, chiefly through the popularity of the cakewalk dance in France. This will serve as a background to an analysis of Debussy’s first ragtime work, ‘Golliwogg’s Cakewalk’ (1908), and his adoption of the cakewalk property of satire. Chapter Two looks at the emergence of American vernacular music in the music halls of London and analyses how Grainger utilised ragtime for his modernist experimentation with piano technique in In Dahomey: Cakewalk Smasher (1909). Chapter Three investigates the evolution of ragtime in the second decade of the century. Included here is a discussion of Stravinsky’s engagement with ragtime, which culminated with his so-called ‘portrait’ of the genre, Piano-Rag-Music (1917). Finally a conclusion compares these three works and seeks to evaluate how they relate to the modernist tendency to redefine ‘high’ and ‘low’ music categories. This thesis will show that Debussy, Grainger and Stravinsky were among the first ‘highbrow’ composers to interact with American popular music by integrating ragtime into their compositions. It will also demonstrate how each composer borrows and manipulates the properties of ragtime as a point of departure for their own modernist experimentations.