2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Scott Joplin's ‘Bethena': The Syncopated Sound of Sorrow
When I first heard Scott Joplin's 'Bethena,' I was a college freshman and my friend Robert was playing it on the piano in a common room. The college's century-old Steinway was appallingly out of tune, and the performance was periodically interrupted by peals of laughter from the adjoining dining hall. I was nonetheless captivated by the strange emotional intensity of this music. It had the intimate, narrative, singable style of a Chopin waltz, with an occasional jazzy minor seventh that marked it as a later creation. But unlike the openly emotive Chopin, this music led separate outer and inner lives. Its exterior was placid, untroubled, matter-of-fact. But in its moments of translucence that exterior was revealed as a mask for a deep melancholy, a melancholy made more agonizing by its inexpressibility. This piece was a dark embodiment of the tensions inherent in ragtime.
What is ragtime? It was an age, for one thing: the time from about 1895 to 1915 when black and white American music cultures began to mix on a national scale. During this era, black musicians for the first time rose to become superstars. As they did, the lines dividing musical genres, and the social rules demarcating which genres were appropriate for which venues and for which kinds of people, began to blur. The sounds of ragtime, which in the 1890s could be found only in the brothels and dive bars of St. Louis and Kansas City, would be played for first-class passengers as the Titanic foundered in April 1912.
