response 157 of 256:

Feb 24 15:39 UTC 2000

    Ragtime was always improvisatory to an extent, but not in
    the same way as jazz.  The ragtime syncopated style of
    performance appears to predate by several years the
    appearance in print of pieces that were labeled as "rags".
    So at the beginning, the music wasn't written down, but
    rather, musicians learned it by ear from hearing other
    musicians perform it.  Under those circumstances, it was
    seldom the case that two musicians played the same piece
    exactly alike.  However, once a musician had learned a
    tune, he or she tended to play it pretty much the same
    way every time, perhaps occasionally incorporating some
    new variation that they'd thought of; improvisation per se
    wasn't part of the ragtime style.  Pieces generally
    consisted of three or four sixteen-bar strains, repeated
    in some fixed pattern such as AABBCCDD or AABBCCB, and
    musicians usually didn't depart from this architecture.

    Around 1898 ragtime piano solos, songs, and band
    arrangments started to be published.  In short order
    the ragtime craze took hold and ragtime publishing became
    a huge business.  Nonetheless, professional musicians
    continued to play the music in their own styles, seldom
    performing it note-for-note as written.  For one thing,
    a musician's image and reputation was founded in part on
    his or her unique style of playing.  For another, many
    musicians of the time didn't even know how to read music
    and learned pieces by ear.  In the musical circles in
    which he moved in his younger days, Scott Joplin was
    known as the "King of the Ragtime WRITERS" because he
    was one of the few who knew musical notation and
    actually wrote his compositions down.

    Those ragtime composers -- such as Joplin, Joseph Lamb,
    and James Scott -- who wanted ragtime to be taken
    seriously on a par with classical compositions, said that
    they preferred that their music be played note-for-note,
    as written.  I don't think they had much success getting
    their contemporaries to do that.  Even Joplin didn't follow
    his own advice, as we know from the testimony of people
    who heard him play, and from the few piano rolls that he
    cut.  In repeats of strains, one hears significant departures
    from the written scores in the bass line.

    Nowadays, ragtime players seem to fall into two camps:  the
    note-for-note camp and the variations-are-desirable camp.  To
    the former group belong Joshua Rifkin, Scott Kirby, and
    David Thomas Roberts, and Glenn Jenks, for example.  In the
    latter one has Bob Milne, Richard Zimmerman, Tony Caramia,
    and Sue Keller.
    
    This is a bit of an oversimplification, because I don't know
    of any current ragtime musician who plays everything exactly
    as written; limited variations on repeats are considered to
    be okay, even by the note-for-noters.  And there are musicians
    whose adherence to the written score depends on what composer
    they're playing.  Jeff Barnhart or Sue Keller might stick
    close to the score with a Joe Lamb rag but go wild with
    variations on Jelly Roll Morton.

    A musician who departs from the printed score doesn't
    necessarily draw the variations out of the air.  A couple
    of years ago, I heard Richard Zimmerman perform a Charlie
    Johnson piece that I'd also been working on.  He threw in
    an enormous number of variations:  interior melodies, doubled
    bass lines, etc.  Later I asked him about that.  He told me
    that ragtime pieces were often published in band arrangments
    as well as piano solos, and that he studies the band 
    arrangments and incorporates elements from them into his
    solo performances, trying for a kind of orchestral effect.
    Zimmerman has prodigious technique, so it works.

    I'm not the ragtime scholar that Zimmerman is, but in my own
    playing -- although I tend to play pretty close to the
    written score -- I incorporate variations that are consistent
    with common practice during the ragtime era.  This includes
    such things as playing the melody an octave higher on repeats,
    doing the bass line in octaves, or playing the final strain of
    a piece at slightly slower tempo for a "grand finale" effect.