THE RAGTIME PIANO REVIVAL IN AMERICA: ITS ORIGINS, INSTITUTIONS, AND COMMUNITY, 1940-2015

Since the early 1940s, ragtime piano has been the focus of a musical revival community in the United States. Like many other music revival movements, what began as an effort by a dedicated few to revitalize and preserve a “vanishing” musical practice—in this case, one that had flourished from the mid-1890s to the mid-1910s—soon attracted ardent enthusiasts eager to collect, compose, and perform ragtime. They celebrated its historical roots while endeavoring to re-establish ragtime as a thriving tradition. This study, drawing on original archival research, interviews with ragtime community members, and the author’s twelve years as a participant-observer in the community, examines the origins and development of the American ragtime piano revival community.\ud \ud Chapter 2 analyzes selected writings of the 1940s, in which the earliest revivalists sought to legitimize ragtime and forge an identity for the music distinct from jazz. Chapter 3 discusses three prominent ragtime serial publications that began in the 1960s (The RagTime Review, The Ragtimer, and The Rag Times), the people and organizations behind them, and the ways in which geographically disparate ragtime revivalists sought to organize their efforts, generating a core ragtime community while debating notions of authenticity in ragtime performance. Chapters 4 and 5 examine two prominent annual ragtime events—The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival and the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest)—to discuss practices through which the ragtime community has maintained and expressed itself into the twenty-first century. The dissertation argues that as the revival community has established and maintained itself, it has witnessed a shift from product-oriented to process-oriented notions of authenticity, heralding the arrival of a “post-revival.”\u