Piano transcriptions of the syncopated, turn-of-the-century melodies created by such masters as Scott Joplin, Percy Wenrich, and Charles Hunter

This collection of the best piano rags by a noted music historian recaptures the lively mood of the ragtime era. All the greats are here, including Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Francis Lamb, as are such popular pieces as "Maple Leaf Rag," "The Entertainer," "Elite Syncopations," and "American Beauty Rag."

A new edition of 12 piano rags by Joseph F. Lamb originally published by John Stark between 1908 and 1919. Edited by Christopher Frieman.

Original sheet music and covers for 40 beloved favorites, including After You've Gone, How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby, and 36 other Golden Oldies. For sing-alongs, family get-togethers, parties, and other events.

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry. Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Roots of the Classical identifies and traces to their sources the patterns that make Western classical music unique, setting out the fundamental laws of melody and harmony, and sketching the development of tonality between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The author then focuses on the years 1770-1910, treating the Western music of this period - folk, popular, and classical - as a single, organically developing, interconnected unit in which the popular idiom was constantly feeding into 'serious' music, showing how the same patterns underlay music of all kinds.

This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.

In 1974, the academy award-winning film The Sting brought back the music of Scott Joplin, a black ragtime composer who died in 1917. Led by The Entertainer, one of the most popular pieces of the mid-1970s, a revival of his music resulted in events unprecedented in American musical history. Never before had any composer's music been so acclaimed by both the popular and classical music worlds. While reaching a "Top Ten" position in the pop charts, Joplin's music was also being performed in classical recitals and setting new heights for sales of classical records. His opera Treemonisha was performed both in opera houses and on Broadway. Destined to be the definitive work on the man and his music, King of Ragtime is written by Edward A. Berlin. A renowned authority on Joplin and the author of the acclaimed and widely cited Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History, Berlin redefines the Scott Joplin biography. Using the tools of a trained musicologist, he has uncovered a vast amount of new information about Joplin. His biography truly documents the story of the composer, replacing the myths and unsupported anecdotes of previous histories. He shows how Joplin's opera Treemonisha was a tribute to the woman he loved, a woman other biographers never even mentioned. Berlin also reveals that Joplin was an associate of Irving Berlin, and that he accused Berlin of stealing his music to compose Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1911. Berlin paints a vivid picture of the ragtime years, placing Scott Joplin's story in its historical context. The composer emerges as a representative of the first post-Civil War generation of African Americans, of the men and women who found in the world of entertainment a way out of poverty and lowly social status. King of Ragtime recreates the excitement of these pioneers, who dreamed of greatness as they sought to expand the limits society placed upon their race.

These extremely worthwhile but lesser-known songs rank among the finest of 19th-century lieder. The scores consist of piano parts with accompanying texts in French, German, or Italian, plus English translations.

Ragtime, the jaunty, toe-tapping music that captivated American society from the 1890s through World War I, forms the roots of America’s popular musical expression. But the understanding of ragtime and its era has been clouded by a history of murky impressions, half-truths, and inventive fictions. Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History cuts through the murkiness. A methodical survey of thousands of rags along with an examination of then-contemporary opinions in magazines and newspapers demonstrate how the music evolved, and how America responded to it.