Magnetic Rag - Reception & Legacy

Reception & Legacy

"Magnetic Rag" is widely understood to present a one-of-a-kind combination of moods, especially for ragtime, and has been described as a melancholic and "haunting" rag.

With the Brahmsian darkness of . . . "Magnetic Rag," the last piece he completed, Joplin had pushed the music far beyond the boisterous beerhall ambience that characterized, for many listeners and players, the rag idiom. This was music on a large scale that was now being squeezed into the narrow confines of rag form—so much so, that the music often burst at the seams.

Some music historians evaluate "Magnetic Rag", as well as other works from Joplin's late period, as being indicative of his unstable mental condition which resulted from the effects of syphilis. One of these is Martin Williams:

Joplin's "last period" is a strange collection of contradictions. Some of his rags reach more toward concert music than did any Jazz up to Lennie Tristano's, while others seem to revert to his 1900 style. Profoundly ambitious passages lie side by side with meaningless, mechanical ditties. It is not hard to find in these compositions a reflection of approaching derangement—he lost his mind in 1916.

In This Is Ragtime, Terry Waldo criticizes this view:

To see Joplin's late rags as a "strange collection of contradictions" . . . misses the point. . . . "Magnetic Rag" does indeed include parts reminiscent of Joplin's 1900 style, but they serve to set up the "profound" parts. Here is a terrifying mixture of the familiar and the agonizing unknown. It is in fact more profound for being able to bring these opposites into focus. The music is heavy with the weight of Joplin's approaching schizoid nightmare—but that is not a weakness.

In his biography of Scott Joplin, James Haskins writes:

Early in 1914 he completed what many consider his finest rag, "Magnetic Rag," which he published himself that same year. It has about it a gentle quality like "The Entertainer," and its distinctive form and range of moods suggest to some musicologists a breakthrough to a Chopinesque form of ragtime, albeit a breakthrough that came too late.

Near the end of his life, Scott Joplin was taking ragtime in a new direction by adding emphasis on form and tonality, and attempting to combine the characteristics of classical Western music and traditional ragtime. This is an entirely different direction than the one that jazz would take.

Jazz, seeking one theme as a center for improvisation, tended to weaken the sense of form that it inherited from ragtime. . . . Joplin's efforts obviously strengthen this sense of form. One has only to hear the blazing return of the first theme of Magnetic Rag—the restoration of major tonality, the momentum of the renewed beat—to recognize the power of recapitulation in ragtime.

In the album notes to Scott Joplin: Piano Rags, Joshua Rifkin describes the "Magnetic Rag" as a "valedictory work" with Joplin paying "tribute" to a "transplanted Middle-European dance music" and the European masters whom he tried to emulate. Rifkin speculates that the composition's short coda also "seems like a farewell, as if he knew how brief and bleak was the time still alloted him." In 1979 Alan Rich in the New York Magazine wrote that by giving artists like Rifkin the opportunity to put Joplin's music on record Nonesuch Records "created, almost alone, the Scott Joplin revival."