A SUNY Plattsburgh professor has recorded a new album — but it’s anything but contemporary. His renditions of late 19th and early 20th century ragtime purposely avoid modernizing and orchestrating the tracks so that you get the true feel of the original music.
When most people think of ragtime, what comes to mind is the movie The Sting and Marvin Hamlisch’s Scott Joplin adaptations.
During the height of the ragtime era, there were more than 100 composers and their music was played in bars, taverns, brothels, homes, anywhere there was a piano. And it would tend to be out of tune or sound what we might now call old-timey: think player pianos rather than today’s orchestrated digital compositions.
SUNY Plattsburgh Associate Professor of Communication Studies Tim Clukeyhas researched ragtime and released an album of the classic tunes — on vinyl, as they were originally heard. “When I started teaching I would ask the students ‘How many of you have burned a CD?’ and you’d see one or two hands go up. The last few years everybody knows how to burn a CD. And that actually got me to thinking that as the years rolled on it was less impressive if somebody knew how to create a CD, but it was more impressive if somebody knew how to create vinyl. And so that’s what got me started with the Recycled Rags project.”
But it wasn’t as easy as grabbing a few music sheets and playing the tunes. Clukey wanted it to be a teaching and learning opportunity for him and his students. They took two years to research vinyl record production, ragtime music and the era’s popular culture. “Ragtime was popular a hundred years ago. Vinyl was the medium a hundred years ago. So recording the ragtime songs, even before that researching, I collected over 300 manuscripts and looking through the different ragtime songs that were out there. And ragtime was unique because it had a twenty lifespan roughly in the late 1890’s and it died out in the middle of World War I, 1915, 1917, that time frame.”
Despite being so short-lived, Clukey says ragtime was the foundation for swing, jazz and blues music. Ragtime saw a resurgence in the 1940s and 50s and again in the 1970s when E.L. Doctorow published the novel Ragtime and The Sting popularized Joplin’s music. That’s when Clukey says he found an affinity for the genre. “Ragtime music is known for its syncopation. It’s anticipating the off beat, not the on beats. You know it always really has its own unique phrasing. I wanted to know more about it.”
For the Recycled Rags project, Clukey collected hundreds of manuscripts and decided to make the music echo its true origins. “I call it Recycled Rags because of bringing them back but also I was trying to recapture what the original sound would be. There’s a honky-tonk style of piano today which is you’re playing in some tavern and the piano is out of tune from just, you know, constant use. But back then I imagine in a brothel the main business of those facilities was not to keep the piano in tune and the entertainers came in and it was one of the ways to be able to make money. But I was just trying to get back to that era. What would it have sounded like?”
“And then on Side B I took the exact same songs and recreated them with synthesizers and so those were the electronic realizations.”
While it’s scored for a single instrument, the piano, Clukey found ragtime extraordinarily complex and challenging to play. “When you look at the sheet music itself it looks like somebody threw thousands of ants on the page. They’ll have chords with, ah, I mean they want every finger occupied and busy at every point in time. So you just see a lot more complexity. It’s not intricate. But it’s just a lot of ability to play a lot of notes in a very short time frame. This one actually is pretty straightforward. There’s some syncopated areas, a lot of off beats. Some of the others they start to get more challenging in how they’re crafted.”
Recycled Rags’ primary release is on vinyl. Clukey says he likes the idea of taking songs that were popular 100 years ago and putting them on a medium that was also popular 100 years ago. “In 1915-1916 if somebody wanted to hear ragtime music, if they weren’t capable of playing it themselves and weren’t going to get the sheet music, they would buy it on vinyl. Of course the vinyl of today holds more songs. (So does vinyl sound better?) You know when you’re listening to ragtime music and you’re saying this music was popular a hundred years ago, hearing all those little crackles and scratches, it really adds to it. I think it does.”
Recycled Rags’ primary pressing is on vinyl. Clukey has also made it available on CD and digitally as a compromise to the modern era.
Music used:
The Sting Original Soundtrack/ Marvin Hamlisch – Scott Joplin
Recycled Rags played by Tim Clukey:
Harlem Rag by Tom Turpin
Magnetic Rag by Scott Joplin
The Chicken Rag by James Brockman
The Chicken Synth Rag
Billiken Rag by E.J. Stark
