later date, The Georgia Campmeeting,[1] Whistling Rufus, Hello, Ma Baby, and the works of Williams and Walker (curiously enough, the best ragtime has not been written by Negroes, although Under the Bamboo Tree and the extraordinary At the Ball are the creations of black men) have their value, but ragtime, as it exists today, had not been invented in the nineties. The apotheosis of syncopation had not begun. Not that syncopation is new in music. Nearly the whole of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is based on it. Schumann scarcely wrote two consecutive bars which are not syncopated. But ragtime syncopation is different. Louis A. Hirsch once pointed out to me what he considered its distinctive feature. "The melody and harmony are syncopated separately,"[2] was his explanation and it will have to suffice, in spite of the fact that the same thing is true of the prelude to Parsifal, in which the conductor is forced to beat 6–4 time with one hand and 4–4 with the other, and of certain Spanish dances, in which singer, guitarist, dancer, and public vie with one
- ↑ Which obviously inspired Debussy's Golliwogg's Cakewalk.
- ↑ He added, further: "In ragtime the syncopation may occur at a different beat in each bar. It is unexpected." It should also be stated that there is usually a curiously exact relationship between the syncopation in the music and that in the words. Modern jazz, a later development of this type of music, has further added a novel colour interest.
