Piano-Rag-Music

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Piano-Rag-Music is a composition for piano solo by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1919. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ragtime, originally a syncopated binary dance with bass note and its chord alternated respectively on the even and odd counts, reached an impressionable peak. Stravinsky, who had, by that time, emigrated to France after his studies with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia, was confronted with American jazz combos actively influential in Europe. However, Stravinsky's knowledge of stylistic jazz properties were limited to scores that his colleague Ernest Ansermet brought him from the United States.

Compositionally, Stravinsky interprets the ragtime in a cubist way, rather than imitate the style. Stravinsky incorporates, or rather, intertwines elements from his Russian period (ostinati, shifting accents, bitonality) with rhythmic and harmonic fragments from ragtime. Furthermore, irregular metra give the piece an improvisatory character. The end, shifting through Various fast and short double thriller parts, perhaps referring more to a form of bruitism than technical capacity, eases down to a halt in a lyric relegation to his Sacre du Printemps.

Stravinsky dedicated the piece to pianist Arthur Rubinstein, as a gratitude for financial support on his behalf. Rubinstein, nevertheless, didn't like it, nor did he seem to have performed it live. However, his technical proficiency would later inspire Stravinsky to arrange his Petrushka for piano solo, Trois mouvements de Petrouchka (1921).

[edit] External links

• Free score, US legal at Sheetmusicarchive.net here