Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Globe and Mail: Scott Joplin's 'Wall Street Rag' Commemorates Panic of 1907

[Wall Street Rag; Scott Joplin; John Frew, Cover; Published in 1908 by Seminary Music Co.]

Toronto Globe and Mail
WALL STREET RAG, MAIN STREET BLUES
Two streets, one shared destiny (Excerpt)
Neil Reynolds, October 1, 2008
In a blog (wildaboutwriting.com) posted last week, for example, Toronto writer Ray Argyle recalls the Panic of 1907 and the remarkable Scott Joplin composition - Wall Street Rag - that commemorated it. In this work, Mr. Argyle says, Joplin sympathetically "captured the delirium, the dismay, the hope and the smug satisfaction of bankers and brokers who lived with the recurring cycles of boom and bust."

Identifying the stages of the business cycle, he says, Joplin divided Wall Street Rag into four parts: the collapse of the market ("Panic on Wall Street"); the remorse ("Brokers Feeling Melancholy"); the confidence that prosperity will return ("Good Times Coming"); and the inevitable return of a bull market ("Listening to the Strains of Genuine Negro Ragtime, Brokers Forget their Cares"). Composed in 1907, Joplin published Wall Street Rag in 1908, when brokers were already getting optimistic again.

Born in small-town Texas in 1868, Joplin moved to New York in 1907 - precisely the year that the Dow fell 50 per cent (from 103 to 50) in a severe Wall Street credit crunch. "In New York, Joplin frequented the watering holes of Tin Pan Alley," Mr. Argyle recounts. "While playing piano at the historic Fraunces Tavern ... Joplin often encountered stockbrokers who would come in for drinks after a day spent hustling stocks. "Scott Joplin's perceptive insights into stock market behaviour were remarkable for anyone with so little education in financial matters. "Ninety years later, the Museum of American Financial History would honour Wall Street Rag for its early recognition of the principle that panics are followed by periods of recovery and stability."

Joplin instructed that Wall Street Rag be played "in very slow march time," turning parts of the piece into something of a dirge. The cover page of the sheet music reveals an artist's impression of the panic - with a mob of black-suited brokers, all looking funereal, congregating in front of the New York Stock Exchange, Trinity Church solemn in the distance.  [Full Post]  [The Ragtime and Classical Composer and Pianist Scott Joplin (1868-1917) is profiled at AfriClassical.com]
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