Benzene 4

Some day your kids will see that

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:00:01 GMT

When I was a teenager, when a few daring young women were starting to get tattoos, a common horrified reaction from older folk was something like, "Don’t you know that’s permanent? Imagine what people will think when you’re 70 years old and you have a tattoo of a butterfly on your boob." I was a logical lad, so I imagined ... and I concluded that if the popularity of tattoos continued to increase (as indeed it did), then by the time she was 70 it would be commonplace and people would just think, "Oh, there’s another old lady with a tattoo on her boob." Now that I’m middle-aged I’m sometimes shocked at how cavalier young people are about having pictures of themselves passed around. When I was in school, a girl would have been mortified if guys got hold of a private picture. Nowadays she’s likely to stand naked in front of a mirror with a cell phone — possibly strategically covering her naughty bits or possibly not — and snap a picture to send to her boyfriend and/or attach with a personal ad. And if her friend says, "Omigod, aren’t you worried that it will get spread all over the internet?" her answer might well be, "Whatever. I don’t care." People of my generation, not to mention those even older, tend to be shocked by this (even as the dirty old men among us help contribute to spreading it all over the internet). A common thought is, "Some day your kids are going to see that," and even for someone like me — who is pretty open-minded in general (and also a dirty old man) — my reaction is "Eeew, that’s so creepy and wrong". But then I remember the tattoos, and I think maybe that’s not a big deal. Maybe in 2070 some 12-year-old boys will be poking around on whatever the technology of the day is and one will say, "Hey, look! Here’s an old video of grandma having sex with some guy." And maybe grandma will be in the room and she’ll say, "Really? Let me see. ... Oh, hey, that’s Dylan. He was nice. I wonder whatever happened to him." And maybe that won’t be the least bit awkward for any of them because by 2070 it will just be normal to see pictures of your grandmother having sex.

To Ourselves and Our Posterity

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:21:40 GMT

By way of Megan McArdle, I come upon this article on Slate which discusses the difficult problem of how to label buried nuclear waste in such a way that our distant predecessors 12,000 years from now will not only be able to interpret the danger warnings but also believe them enough to heed them. I suppose this is an interesting intellectual puzzle, but I can't get interested in it because with every sentence I read, all I can think of is, "Why on earth would I care about the health of people 12,000 years in the future??" To tell the truth, I don't think there even will be any human beings at all 12,000 years from now. I'm not quite as gloomy as my philosophy professor friend who calmly and rationally predicts that some sort of ecological catastrophe will wipe out at least a tenth of the world's population within his lifetime, but I do think it more likely than not that our species will be extinguished some time before 10,000 years are up. But that's not even the point. Even supposing people do exist 12,000 years from now, who are they to us? Possibly they are our great-to-the-360th grandchildren. But what the heck does that mean? Do you feel any connection whatsoever to your great-to-the-360th grandparents, who lived around the time when homo sapiens first discovered agriculture? Most of us can't even name our third cousins. Most of us don't even care about the health of villagers in Guatemala right now. Yet somehow I'm to believe we're going to spare no expense in assuring that 12,000 years from now Zogdor doesn't accidentally poison himself by digging up some old plutonium? (Assuming Zogdor even exists.) (And that he isn't a robot immune to poisoning anyway.) My mind boggles. I wonder if this is another science fiction thing. I often find that the culture of science fiction warps people's thinking when considering risks and probabilities of unlikely events. (Or at least the thinking of literate, geeky types; ordinary people seem less afflicted by this.) Like when people fret about how we'll escape when the stars of the galactic core all go supernova, or how how it will affect our society when we colonize other solar systems. Uh, hello, even the nearest one is more than four light years away. That means it is, at minimum, a four-year trip. And that's assuming you travel at the speed of light, at which point, among other things, your mass becomes infinite. And yet, everyone seems so certain that somehow we are going to defy this fundamental law of nature because ... warp speed! wormholes! tachyon beams! I mean, that's what they do in all the books, right? So maybe this is why people think handsome blonde Captain Joe Johnson is going to be exploring the ruins of Yucca Mountain 12,000 years from now. Because that's exactly what would happen in a movie.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:16:08 GMT

Earlier this year, my favorite former player on my favorite baseball team — Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics — was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His plaque looks like this: In case that picture is unreadable or has been taken down by the time you're reading this, the main text says:

Faster than a speeding bullet, scored more runs (2,295) and stole more bases (1,406) than any player in history, combined power, plate disclipline, flair and an uncanny ability to electrify crowds. Hit .279 with 3,055 hits, 297 home runs and 1,115 RBIs, set records for home runs to lead off game (81) and unintentional walks (2,129). A ten-time All-Star and the 1990 A.L. MVP, led league in steals 12 times, including three 100-plus seasons and a modern-day record 130 thefts in 1982. Won World Series with Oakland and Toronto.

Aside from the generally slapdash quality of the prose, what most intrigues me about this text is the word that's missing: "other". It does not say that Rickey stole more bases than any other player in history; it says he stole more bases than any player in history. Which includes himself. You can think of that as an editing error if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical conundrum. If God is omnipotent, is he able to create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? How fast is Rickey? Rickey is so fast that he can steal more bases than Rickey. (And nobody steals more bases than Rickey.)

Close States

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:34:54 GMT

Here's a fun little geography riddle I thought up while driving home this evening: Which two U.S. states are nearest to each other without actually sharing a border? My first thought is and , which seems like a pretty solid guess, but I haven't really thought it through. (That's special invisible type there, in case you want to guess on your own. Just select the paragraph when you're ready to read the spoilers.) Later: Some other ideas: or are geographically interesting, but I don't think they win. The states are just bigger out west. and also seem promising. Ooh, wait, I just thought of . That's the only one I think might actually beat my original guess. I'm not sure how one goes about measuring if it's close. Still later: Oh, duh. The correct answer must surely be and . It seems so obvious in retrospect. Not just obvious, but boring, too. So I guess my little riddle isn't such an interesting one after all. Oh well. Still later again: One could make an argument for and . Careful examination suggests that they're closest of all, but the same examination calls into question what counts as sharing a border. Look at the map and you'll see what I mean.

Blog Update

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:39:22 GMT

Hmm. Looking through the archive, I see the last time I was posting with any regularity was early March. Not that I need an excuse for not posting, but that's the time of year when my day job gets especially busy and stays that way till April 15. Immediately after that I had a rather significant crisis in my personal life (which I don't care to discuss here, though nearly all my regular readers know what I'm talking about). That in turn necessitating moving, with all the distraction and disruption entailed in the process of packing up and settling in again elsewhere. That takes me up to early June. For the rest of the summer, I don't know, I guess I just fell out of the habit. This post is by way of falling back into the habit. After past resurrections of Benzene, I've set a goal of posting daily for a while. I don't expect that this time, but I do want to get back to two or three posts a week. I have several months worth of half-written posts either in notes or in my head, and most of them are no less interesting now than they were when they were fresh. I also still haven't given up on my "books I've read" series, even though I'm more than a year behind and may have lost track of a few.

The Future of Benzene

A few weeks ago, I got an email from the makers of Radio (the brand of blog software I use) informing me that they will discontinue their service at the end of this calendar year. I ended up on Radio more or less by accident; it's what Pete was using at the time, so I followed his example. Not long after that Pete moved on to one of the free services, but I was happy enough with Radio so I stayed put. Radio is run as a subscription service, and for $40 a month you get whatever updates they make to the software plus server space for your blog. I'm not sure I ever updated the software, since it was working just fine for me without upgrading, but I figured the $40/year was a small price to pay for not having to think about how to make my blog work. Now I do have to think. Some time between now and the end of the year, I need to decide whether to migrate to some other service, continue in Radio but upload it somewhere else, or just hang up the blog altogether and call it quits. All three seem plausible to me. Radio software has an option for uploading to an address other than Radio's default space. I've never tried it but I assume it's not hard. My problem is figuring out where I'd go. I keep a mirror of Benzene on my hard drive at home, and the entire archive is 8.7 MB, more than half of which is 2004, my first year. That doesn't strike me as very large — its smaller than one medium-sized video file — but I still don't have anywhere to put it. My Earthlink service gives me five email addresses with 5 MB of space for each. Since I'm only using about two and a half of those for other stuff, I'd have enough space if only I could combine two of the 5 MB allotments into one, but I don't think I can do that. If anyone out there has any advice for cheap low-traffic webspace, I'd be interested in hearing it. I'm also interested in recommendations for other blog software to switch to.

The Best of Scott Joplin

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:58:26 GMT

This article has been in the works for half a year, with most of it written in February. Benzene has been inactive for so long that I'm not sure anyone will read this on the day it is posted. Nevertheless, it pleases my sense of ceremony to present it on April 28, 2009, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Scott Joplin's masterpiece.

Our story begins last August, when I bought a used piano off CraigsList. I've had a piano for most of my life, but only intermittently since moving to Seattle. I had intended to get one since we first moved into this house, but somehow I kept putting it off for two years, the longest I've ever gone without. In the past I've usually had my bookshelf full of music right next to the piano, but this time my household geography was different: except for what could fit in the piano bench, all the music resided in another room. A small collection of favorite books ended up in the bench, and I ended up playing mostly from them. One of them was my book of Scott Joplin rags. I've had this since I was a child, or at least our family had it. The book was published in 1972 (second edition), and we must have bought it not long after that. I'm pretty sure the copy I have is the original, though I know my sister has a copy of the same book. All three of us played a lot of Joplin as kids. In retrospect I realize I almost never played the pieces my brother played and vice versa. Whether I was deliberately avoiding his territory or he was avoiding mine, I don't know. The exception is Bethena, which all three of us played. My main memory of my sister with Joplin is that she and I would often play rags as duets with me playing the right hand part and her playing the left hand, a tradition we have continued to occasionally repeat as adults. The book is properly titled The Collected Works of Scott Joplin: Volume I. Volume one is for Joplin's works for piano, which the publishers surely must have known would sell better than volume two, works for voice. The latter is of interest mostly to scholars, and consists mostly of the piano-vocal score of Joplin's opera Treemonisha. Many years later I borrowed volume two from a library. As a big fan of Joplin and a big fan of opera, I thought the idea of an opera by Joplin sounded very exciting. In fact, it was a big letdown. For one thing, it's not very "operatic", being more in the operetta-ish style of, say, Reginald de Koven. For another, it wasn't particularly good. Joplin was genius as a composer of ragtime, but as an opera songwriter he was run of the mill. I like turn-of-the-century American operetta as much as the next guy — actually, I like it considerably more than most people do, even limiting the comparison to the small minority who have any opinion on it at all — but there's nothing special there. But I digress. Some time last fall, I got the idea in my head that I'd play through the entire book from start to finish. Since I had played very little Joplin in the past 10 years, this would be a fun trip down memory lane. I wasn't even sure if I had played every rag in the book. Indeed, I'm still not sure. Many were familiar from my own playing or from hearing my brother's; many others were felt unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean I never played them once or twice way back when. In the course of playing through, I noticed that some that I thought I liked weren't as good as I remembered, and others I thought I didn't like were better than I remembered. That gave me the new idea of picking out a top ten list of favorite and ranking them. So I played through the whole book again, though skipping quickly through the obvious chaff and taking notes on the better ones. I spent much of January playing the top candidates over and over until they fell into a ranking.

Music Criticism

Whenever I read music criticism or analysis, I ponder the question of why such writings are usually so wretched and unreadable. Since most of my musical readings are from the classical genre, I am often driven to ask: Must every music critic be an insufferable blowhard spouting meaningless academic nonsense? But then on reflection, I wonder if the fault isn't with the writer so much as with the subject. Perhaps the aesthetics of music is such a personal and non-verbal subject that it isn't easily expressed in words, and whatever words are chosen don't do a very good job of conveying what the writer had in mind. Maybe what seems like nonsensical drivel is actually intelligent opinion that would make sense to me if only it could be communicated telepathically directly from the author, but when put into words on paper too much is lost in the translation. Being on the other side of the equation now, I wonder if my own descriptions will seem just as nonsensical to my readers. Here in my Joplin list, if I say that one rag has good "story" while another does not, is my reader going to ask, "'Story'? What the heck does that mean?" As I hope many of you know — and if you don't know this, I'm afraid this very specialized post will mean little or nothing to you — Scott Joplin wrote ragtime. Indeed, the "King of Ragtime" so far outshines all other authors that he practically defines the genre. The rag, like the sonata or the rondo, is a very restricted form. A properly constructed rag has four themes. Each theme is exactly 16 bars and each theme is repeated without variation. Typically, the second theme is followed by a single repeat of the first theme. The right hand always carries the melody, while the left hand carries the harmony. The left hand keeps a steady beat, typically in an "oom-pah" pattern of bass notes alternating with chords, while the right-hand melody is typically heavily syncopated. Throughout the entire piece, there is little or no variation in tempo (a vestige of the genre's dance origins). Of course there is no enforcer compelling the composer to follow all of these rules, and indeed there are many many exceptions throughout the ragtime corpus. But whenever one departs from the pattern, one loses a little bit of what makes a rag a rag. Too much variation and it's no longer a rag. The ragtime formula works. If you depart from the formula, what you get instead may or may not work. But at the same time, the formula severely limits what one can do artistically. The oom-pah plus melody can become quite dull very quickly. The obligatory repeats don't allow much freedom to develop a theme. The unchanging tempo makes it hard to express any variety of emotion. And while there's nothing to prevent one from alternating between loud and soft, the general uniformity of mood and tempo doesn't easily lend itself to dynamic variety that is meaningful. Because a typical rag consists of four otherwise unrelated themes chained end to end, it is a challenge for a rag to be more than the sum of its parts. There isn't much scope for making each theme meaningfully follow the previous one, as opposed to being tacked together in some other order, or mixed and matched with themes from other rags. Many of Joplin's rags (and many more rags by other composers) I would say fail on this count. Where they succeed, Joplin had a variety of strategies, but the commonest pattern tended to give each theme a certain characteristic. The first theme, which besides introducing the piece is usually the only one to recur later, wants to have a friendly and accessible sound. The second theme wants a sense of progress as if it is taking us somewhere. The third theme is usually the most interesting harmonically, and often the most exciting in general; this is where we often get lots of dominant sevenths with chromatics from outside the main key. The fourth theme needs to have a sense of completion, either as a satisfying denouement from the climactic third theme, or by carrying the climax even further and driving it home with a flourish. This is not the only strategy, but the point of it or any other strategy is to give the rag a feeling of completeness and direction that makes it more than just four themes played in succession. That is what I mean by "story". The challenge for any rag is to cope with the limits of the ragtime form. The rags on my list succeed in one of two ways. Either they stay within the form and find a way to be beautiful in spite of the limits (eg, Easy Winners), or they push the envelope and expand the form without breaking it, either a little (eg, Maple Leaf) or a lot (eg, Solace). Likewise, the rags that fail to be great can fail in one of two ways. In a few adventurous rags, the innovation doesn't quite work and the result is a mess (eg, Euphonic Sounds). More often, they are safely within bounds but remain limited by it. Of these latter, there are many. Lest I be misunderstood, I want to clarify that where I say a rag "fails" I don't mean it's really a failure. Almost all of Joplin's rags are good, and many of the ones that don't make my top ten list are still very good, they're just not quite as good as the top ten. Among Joplin's piano works there is very little that I would say is actually "bad", and even that isn't nearly as bad as bad ragtime by other composers. When we were kids we had another book titled "Ragtime Rarities" with rags by composers other than Joplin. (I probably still have that book, packed away in a box somewhere.) Some of those were really awful. My sister and I, having fun with the book's title, liked to comment after trying a particularly bad one, "wow, that one is really rare!". Even the worst of Joplin never came close to those. He isn't the king for nothing.

For Your Listening Pleasure

For further discussion Joplin rags, I recommend Perfessor Bill Edwards' ragtime website. I know Joplin fairly well, but the Perfessor knows him way better than I ever will. He offers brief opinions on every rag, and some of his differ sharply from mine. I mention this here, ahead of my own commentary, only because I know some of my readers may want to listen along to the pieces. If you're going to do that, your best bet on the Internet is Perfessor Bill's midi files. A midi file is not the same as a wav or mp3 sound file. It does not record the actual sound; rather it records data describing notes, duration, dynamics, etc, and plays them back using your own computer's resources. Among other things, this means that if your computer has a crappy piano midi patch (which it probably doesn't, since almost every operating system has a decent piano nowadays), the midi files will sound like they're being played on a crappy instrument. The reason you want Perfessor Bill's midi files instead of someone else's is because he has provided sophisticated midi data that incorporates nuances of dynamic, tempo, etc, so that it actually sounds like a real person is playing. (Indeed, I assume the Perfessor really did play the pieces, on a special keyboard designed to capture the performance as midi data.) There are other sites offering Joplin midi files, but these are simple transcriptions from the notes on the page, so they are "played" mechanically with no human interpretation. Ragtime suffers quite a bit less from a mechanical interpretation than does most music, but even so, some of these plain midi files sound awful. Listening to these them is a good reminder of how important human interpretation is in any genre of music. If you're listening along with Perfessor Bill, you should know that he takes great liberties with the music. Not only does he add considerable ornamentation, but he doesn't hesitate to change notes and rewrite wherever he sees fit. His Maple Leaf, for instance, is rather drastically rearranged. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm not well-versed in ragtime musicology, but I know there are plenty of other genres where the composer never intended the music to be played exactly as written, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's true of ragtime as well. I mention it only because what the Perfessor plays might not always coincide with what I discuss here. I'm judging the rags strictly by how they are written and published.

The List

It has become traditional when announcing rankings to list them in reverse order. This creates some suspense, but only paradoxically. True, you have to wait longer to hear the top choices, but along the way you have narrowed the competition so the only real suspense is the order of the top few. Unless your list is short, by the time you reach number one, there's no doubt who it will be: the nine next-best have already been ruled out. Of the candidates remaining, one will get the top spot and the others will be omitted entirely. Unless the competition is extremely clumped at the top, it will be pretty obvious. If you're actually going to sit down and play them all, I do recommend going last to first, but for listing them here I prefer to simply start at the top. 1. Solace: A Mexican Serenade (April 28, 1909). This is truly Joplin's masterpiece, and it's not even close. Many rags succeed by having four themes all of above average quality. Others succeed by having one extraordinary theme while the others are decent. In Solace, all four themes are extraordinary, brilliant even, and expertly crafted as well. Everything about the piece is perfection. Besides being the best, Solace is unique in Joplin's canon in several ways. Technically, the left hand plays a tango rhythm in three of the four themes. That rhythm is used a little bit in Wall Street, but nowhere else that I can think of. Stylistically, Solace has a softness that most Joplin pieces lack. Ragtime is not a romantic genre. Here and there among Joplin's works, one might find bits of lyricism or romantic lushness, but even those aren't very deep. Solace goes way beyond that. The entire piece is deeply sentimental, suffused with a serene beauty. Solace was featured prominently in the sound track for the movie The Sting. It is used in places that require music that is poignant and emotionally evocative. It's hard to imagine anything else by Joplin could have served the same purpose. In contrast, one can easily imagine a dozen other themes that might have replaced the first movement of the Entertainer as the main theme. 2. Bethena: A Concert Waltz (March 6, 1905). As a general rule, I don't care for Joplin's waltzes (nor for his marches, which are typically written in 6/8). Like his contemporary, John Philip Sousa, Joplin wants to write in triple meters, and he never stops trying, but he only really shines in 4/4 or 2/4. And yet Bethena is a prominent exception. It's the only Joplin waltz that's any good at all, and it's marvelous. Like Solace, Bethena is an outlier among Joplin's works, unlike anything else he wrote. It is easily the most complete and polished of Joplin's works, very thoroughly and formally constructed, like a Mozart sonata. The label "concert waltz" suggests what Joplin was aiming for. Though not nearly equal in scope, in style it's a lot like a Chopin waltz. (I'm thinking of the one in Eb, opus 18). Joplin completely breaks the ragtime mold with this one, so much that it's hardly a rag at all. It has five themes, structured A-BB-A-CC-DDEE-A, with episodes in bridging all the gaps. The whole piece is Mozartean — recalling the anecdotal idea of every note being exactly right, neither too many nor too few — but it's the exquisite little episodes that are most Mozartean at all. Breaking the mold allows Joplin to avoid the usual shortcomings of ragtime. Whereas rags are typically just now loud, now soft, with punctuated accents, Bethena has real depth of dynamic. And it has a story arc that few if any rags match. 3. Wall Street Rag (Feb 23, 1909). As special as Solace is, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Wall Street, which preceded it by only a few months, is similar in both style and structure, and it's an excellent work for most of the same reasons. In pure inspiration, the fourth theme is one of the best Joplin wrote, as well as one of the jazziest. It is his most audacious as well as the most successful use of what were called "crazy chords" (ie, tightly spaced chords with lots of added 6th, 7ths or 9ths resulting in clusters, but written high enough above the bass root that they're still basically concordant) giving a sort of raucous, jangly feel. Uniquely, it is published with little text notes telling a pseudo-story (about Wall Street brokers reacting to ups and downs of the market). I don't hate these as much as Rudi Blesh does. I think they're sort of cute, so long as you don't try to take them too seriously. Any failure of the specific Wall Street imagery shouldn't hide the truth that this piece tells a good story, moving neatly from mood to mood in satisfying progression. In many ways it's more exciting than its sister piece, Solace, but it doesn't quite achieve the latter's pure beauty. 4. Elite Syncopations (Dec 29, 1902). Ragtime is feel-good music. A good measure of a rag is whether it makes you smile. Elite Syncopations makes you smile from beginning to end. This is the best of Joplin's early works, in my estimation even beating out his smash hit. All the themes are solid, and they're put together in a way that makes the whole greater than its parts. Elite Syncopations stays very true to the standard rag form, and there's nothing really novel or daring about it. The first three themes are mostly unadorned one-note melodies with traditional accompaniment, which nicely sets up the booming and exuberant fourth theme. There's no great novelty or gimmickry here. It's just a very well-written traditional rag that bubbles over with pure joy. 5. Maple Leaf Rag (Sept 18, 1899). Before The Sting, this was easily Joplin's most celebrated rag. Unlike the Entertainer, it deserves its reputation. Maple Leaf was Joplin's first and greatest hit. That's an understatement. Maple Leaf was the blockbuster hit of the decade. It put Joplin on the map. It put ragtime on the map. It was the first non-vocal sheet music to sell a million copies in the United States. The Maple Leaf Rag came surprisingly early in Joplin's career. Before it, he published only four other works; three of those are junk, and the fourth (the Original Rags) were actually written after Maple Leaf but published sooner. Maple Leaf is startlingly mature for its time period. Although it doesn't go as far as Joplin's later works, it's noticeably more sophisticated than most of the rags that followed for the next several years. Maple Leaf would stand out in any case, But what really sets Maple Leaf apart is its excellent bass line. It seems almost trivial now, when compared to more obvious innovations that followed, but Maple Leaf broke the rag out of the oom-pah mold. If you're a pianist, read through Maple Leaf playing just the left-hand part and notice how musically interesting it is. Then play the left-hand part of the Peacherine Rag (Joplin's next big hit) and see how dull it is in comparison. The bass line is why Peacherine is OK and Maple Leaf is brilliant. (It's also what gives Elite Syncopations' fourth theme its climactic feeling of completely breaking out.) The listeners of the time may not have analyzed it so, but they surely felt the difference. Joplin's improved bass lines, full of movement and accent, is what gave his rags that extra oomph that had been missing. That, in turn, is what turned the rinky-dink dance-club genre into a real musical movement. It's also what made Joplin the master of the genre. Throughout his work, it is his mastery of the bass line that really sets him apart. Besides that, Maple Leaf has four strong themes and it's extremely well-crafted. Joplin worked on this piece for many years before it was published, and one senses that he took all that time to be sure that every note was as good as it could be. (With later works, after his fame was secured, he wasn't always so careful.) 6. Pine Apple Rag (Oct 12, 1908). If early rags like Maple Leaf and Elite Syncopations are Joplin's Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, and the brilliant works from his later period like Solace and Wall Street are his Aïda and Otello, then the Pine Apple is his Ballo in Maschera, pointing the way from the one to the other. The traditional (and somewhat dull) first theme is rooted in the past, but the other three are all inspired and point to where Joplin is going: The jangly second and exuberant fourth themes hint at Wall Street, and the uncharacteristically low and mellow third theme hints at Solace. On its own Pine Apple is a good solid rag, packing lots of novelty without breaking the mold. 7. Gladiolus Rag (Sept 24, 1907). Joplin wrote several rags which, consciously or unconsciously, imitate the Maple Leaf — either in the overall structure of the whole or just in the first theme, with its very characteristic pattern (ie, a two-bar melody, repeated; two sparse bars that stop the flow, usually in minor or diminished harmony; two ascending bars, made up of a half-bar figure repeated in four octaves; and finally a four-bar melody, played first in the upper octave then repeated in the lower octave). The worst of these (eg, Leola) feel like a cheap ripoff, but the better ones make you smile and say, "Hey, that's kinda nice ... reminds me of Maple Leaf." The best of the Maple Leaf clones is Gladiolus. It's a glorious rag for pretty much the same reasons Maple Leaf is: strong themes, strong bass line. The last two themes work especially well in Gladiolus. Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus is written thick. Some rags (eg, Elite Syncopations) shine with simple one-note melodies, like a pretty little babbling brook. Gladiolus, like Maple Leaf, is a gushing river, flowing with big handfuls of notes. The third theme of Gladiolus is as grandiose as Joplin ever gets. (Again, I'm reminded of Chopin; this time a ballade or maybe a polonaise.) Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus reaches its climax in the third theme, but rather than just dropping off after that, the fourth theme is written in a way that feels like it continues to coast blissfully on the waves created by that climax. In some ways Gladiolus is better than Maple Leaf. It's certainly bolder, but it's also less refined. I find it hard to judge in isolation, knowing as I do that Maple Leaf is the original and Gladiolus is the imitation. If I could hear the two rags for the first time not knowing which came first, would I consider Gladiolus the superior work? I really don't know. 8. The Easy Winners: A Ragtime Two Step (Oct 10, 1901). The Easy Winners is the purest example of mastering the traditional ragtime form. It is a simple piece with very little innovation, but it is so artfully crafted that it gleams with its simplicity. It's also one of only two* Joplin rags in which I feel any bond between the music and its title. With most rags, there is no connection whatsoever: the Maple Leaf, Pine Apple and Gladiolus rags, for example, have nothing at all to do with their respective botanical eponyms. The cover illustration for the Easy Winners shows four little illustrations of sporting events: a baseball scene, a football scene, some jockeys racing on horses, and some racing yachts. Given that little visual hint, I find the music very reminiscent of a sporting campaign. Each new theme tells of an episode on the way toward the championship, another challenge successfully met, culminating in the exuberant celebratory final theme. That final theme is surely the best, one of my favorites in all of Joplin, but it's made all the sweeter by the journey. Knowing the piece as I do, I find myself smiling in anticipation through the first three themes, knowing how it will end. And yet, I'm in no hurry to get there, happy to play every repeat because the whole process is so much fun. Somehow it feels right to know how the piece will end. There is no drama in this campaign, no dark moment of crisis, no doubt. These winners are easy winners. The great charm of the piece is the tone of easy confidence that pervades it. *(The other is The Cascades — named for a monumental fountain display at the 1904 World Expo in St Louis, not the mountains in Washington and Oregon — which has a few instances of waterfallish tone painting. I suppose "Solace" is descriptive, too. The Wall Street Rag, in spite of it's attempt at a written storyline, really isn't) 9. Rose Leaf Rag: A Ragtime Two Step (Nov 15, 1907). There are three Joplin rags omitted from my book. I'm told that newer editions of the complete works include them, but when the collection was first published in 1971 many of the rags were still under copyright protection, and the publisher was unable to reach terms with the owner of these three. All three have long since come into the public domain and with a little effort they can be found on the Internet. In the course of my ranking, I hunted them down and added them to the audition. The Rose Leaf Rag is strongly reminiscent of the Wall Street Rag, which followed a little more than a year later. In all four themes it shows distinct and direct similarities, which makes it hard to play the one without thinking of the other. Like the talented boy with an even more talented older brother, poor Rose Leaf suffers in comparison. It's hardly fair. If Wall Street didn't exist, I'm sure I'd appreciate Rose Leaf even more than I do. It has four excellent themes (especially the second theme, which I love), but when I play the third and most especially the fourth theme, I can't help thinking that, as good as this is, I know that Wall Street is even better. 10. Weeping Willow: Ragtime Two Step (June 6, 1903). This is another early rag that succeeds by making the most of the traditional form rather than breaking out of it. What sets it apart is its sense of unhurried, casual elegance, which is rare in ragtime. All four themes are nice, but if there's a weakness it's that there's no real climax. Easy Winners and Elite Syncopations, the two on my list that are in the same style as Weeping Willow, both end with an energetic fourth theme that brings down the curtain as it were. Willow's fourth theme is nice but doesn't have the same power. Two of Joplin's rags — the Maple Leaf and the Pine Apple — were also arranged and published as songs with lyrics. If ever saw these in volume two, I don't remember them. I suspect they were chosen for their sellability, not their singability; neither tune seems an obvious candidate for vocal adaptation. The one Joplin rag that feels to me like it wants to be sung is the Weeping Willow. Though ragtime is almost always melodious, it's rarely cantabile. Willow is an exception. It's like a serenade. A serenade on the veranda on a lazy summer evening.

Honorable Mentions

There are many, but they can wait for another day. This post is long enough.

Conundrum

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:02:27 GMT

What if God does not exist, but those who believe in Him anyway go to Heaven?