Scott Joplin: The Strenuous Life

I wrote these programme notes for Christ Church Music Weekend, May 2016.

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”

Theodor Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (1899)

Teddy Roosevelt's Chicago speech which is this rag's namesake embodies some important archetypal turn-of-the-century American values: that the American Dream is within the grasp of those who work hard, that the rise of capitalism will set you free, and that what's good for the individual is good for Society (with a capital[ist] S). Masculinity, patriotism, nationalism. This was shortly after a time when music publishing had turned a real corner. The marketing of popular music for home consumption was at an all-time high, the piano roll was just being introduced, and Tin Pan Alley was born.

Nevertheless, to tie the work of Scott Joplin up in this rise of mass production would be to do him something of an injustice. Dubbed the “King of Ragtime,” his Maple Leaf Rag, became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and was described by Bill “Perfesser” Edwards as definitive of its genre. And yet, by all accounts, he truly did lead “the strenuous life,” and was forever pushing beyond the early 20^th century's horizon of expectation for a young black man. Born to parents freed from slavery, he laboured on the railroads of Northeast Texas. Described by Peter Hammond as both “one of those inexplicable geniuses who occur once or twice in a generation” and a “pathetic and frustrated failure,” he had almost no money or academic training when he moved to Missouri in 1894 to work as a piano teacher, and in spite of the early success of Maple Leaf Rag, by the time he published The Strenuous Life in 1902, his debts were racking up. The score to his first opera A Guest of Honor was repossessed along with the rest of his belongings in 1903, and is now lost. In light of the failure of Joplin's second opera Treemonisha  (despite being finally produced in full to wide acclaim by the ragtime revival movement in 1972), Hammond writes that “nobody was interested, at that time, in thinking of ragtime in anything but vulgar and strictly commercial terms; except Joplin.” He died of syphilis-induced dementia in a mental institution in 1917, aged approximately 49 (the exact date of his birth differs between sources).

The Strenuous Life is a two-step—a dance consisting of two steps in approximately the same direction onto the same foot, separated by a closing step with the other foot. Ragtime was an established dance genre in African-American communities long before it was popularly published for parlour pianists, when it became heavily influenced by the structure of march forms made popular by John Philip Sousa (for example, Stars and Stripes Forever). Therefore, Joplin's most famous rags such as The Maple Leaf and The Entertainer both follow a motivic AA BB A CC DD and move from their tonic “home” keys to their subdominant chord IV keys, before returning “home.” However, The Strenuous Life starts in C major and ends, surprisingly, in F major, C's subdominant. This surprising tonal turn reveals the opening key—what we presumed, because of traditional sonata forms, to be the tonic “home”—to actually be the dominant (chord V) of the home key, which we do not reach until the end. While this practice is by no means unheard of in ragtime, the fact that it is unheard of in the genre's most famous and influential pieces perhaps suggests how discomfiting popular culture found this subversive tonal practice. By tricking us into thinking that our goal is somewhere different to what we thought, perhaps Joplin is making a statement about the harsh reality Roosevelt's unattainable American Dream. The under-appreciated victim of the real “strenuous life” and one of capitalism's burn-outs, Scott Joplin certainly did not “shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil,” and still “the splendid ultimate triumph” of success was only granted to him when he was long-dead.