Following emancipation, Black performers, both male and female, occupied increasing central roles in popular entertainments. Why? As my research shows, the disdain and even fear directed towards ragtime came from its origins in the music and dance of formerly enslaved African Americans. Many found the music offensive, the dancing objectionable, and the popularity of both with young people verging on a mental health crisis. At the time, ragtime and its surrounding culture raised considerable concerns. What is ragtime? Most of us know it as the lively, upbeat piano solos of Scott Joplin, but ragtime was performed on all kinds of instruments and by groups, including John Phillip Sousa’s band. ![]() I am interested in how ragtime music and dance became part of a larger process of transition and change in American life across the multiple boundaries of gender, race, class, citizenship, education, and national identity. Ragtime achieved transatlantic popularity in the late 1800s, at a time of great social and technological change, so studying its history opens up a host of other issues to explore: recording technology, new kinds of public spaces, commercial entertainments, urban industrial lifestyles, the changing roles of women, the formative presence of Black American professional entertainers, and the place of the United States as an emerging superpower. Ragtime music, characterized by distinctive energetic syncopation, and the social dancing that went along with it, was always about more than music and dance. Her research focuses on American musics of all kinds and demonstrates her commitment to feminist methodologies, interdisciplinary cultural criticism, and to demonstrating the power of music to create meaningful change. ![]() Cook is director of the Mead Witter School of Music and has been a faculty member since 1991.
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