Classic Piano Rags [Paperback] Review

There are a fair number of books on the market with ragtime sheet music in them.This is the one I've used the most over the years, since despite its quirks it's the best way of getting a hold of a generous amount of period ragtime, in unedited form.
About that "unedited form".The book photographically reproduces the original sheet music verbatim.This has its downside: the original music companies printed things in a quick'n'dirty manner, & while the sheet music from Stark (Joplin, Lamb, Scott, &c) is usually well-presented & carefully set, some of the other music is sprinkled with errors & eccentricities, especially the tunes by Charles Hunter.However, I'd rather have the typos--easily fixed--than have some meddling editor tidy up the text.Editions of these tunes by people like Max Morath tend to have a fair bit of editorial interference, & I'd much rather see what the tunes looked like without that kind of filtering.
Dover also prides itself on historically accurate reprints.This means that you get the original cover art.....which is as you'd imagine often pretty offensive by modern standards in its depiction of African-Americans.Still, it's just as well to be reminded of the historical conditions of this music's creation and dissemination. -- What's more irritating & less justifiable about the decision to include cover art is that it completely throws off the pagination.Since each piece is typically 4 pages long, adding the cover art makes for 5 pages--so that every second piece has its page turns in exactly the wrong place.This isn't a minor quibble: often the page turns are as a result placed in the middle of repeats, at key moments in the score, &c.Dover ought to have added some blank pages to keep the rectos & versos in the right sequence.
Anyway, enough caviling.What you get is an enormous pile of Joplin--nice, but that's easily enough available elsewhere.But you get a huge selection of work by most of the other really interesting figures of the period.I think Blesh's concept of "Classic Ragtime" is a crock, an attempt to make polemical distinctions between high art & popular trash in a genre where such distinctions are hard to make.& what does the idiosyncratic, rather naive music of Charles Hunter have to do with the sophisticated creations of Joplin or Artie Matthews anyway?Anyway, it's great to have all this stuff here--pieces by Robert Hampson, Hunter, Charles L Johnson, Joplin, Joe Jordan, Joe Lamb, Arthur Marshall, Matthews, Scott, Charles Thompson, Tom Turpin, Percy Wenrich, Clarence Woods.I've spent years working through the book.
Fans of this book, by the way, should check out Trebor Tichenor's two volumes of ragtime rarities for Dover--these include some terribly obscure stuff along with lesser-known Scott & Lamb pieces, & is very much worth exploring if you're curious about the genre.

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Product Description:
Best ragtime music (1897-1922) by the greatest ragtime composers of the age: Scott Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb, Tom Turpin, nine more. Definitive collection for lovers and performers of ragtime.


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