ABSTRACT
In the late teens, amateur players—who had always been the most fanatic of ragtime's fans—began to notice that mastering a rag came harder than it used to. Those who instinctively bought anything in the music store with the word “Rag” in its title took their purchases home to find that some serious woodshedding lay ahead before they could show off to their friends. The simplified (published) rags of Artie Matthews, Eubie Blake, and Luckey Roberts were harder to play than the undiluted rags of a decade earlier had been. The home players were confronted with brisk one-step tempo markings, complex syncopations, chord clusters, and unpredictable breaks. And even harder syncopated homework was around the corner. When novelty ragtime became popular in the early 1920s, more players were cowed into giving up playing than were inspired to practice.
