George Botsford's Ragtime Piano Performance

In the twentieth century, new trends in music emerged after Romanticism reached the peak of artistic maturity, and new types of musical schools emerged, such as Impressionism and New Classicism, all of which aimed to search for new concepts for realistic music that kept pace with the spirit of the new era.

Jazz music also emerged from these new trends in the United States of America, and ragtime music is considered one of the most important types of jazz music that emerged in the American Southwest. It is a style of composing American folk music for Negroes and depends on the stability of the form and delaying the tone for renewed rhythms full of vitality, written for the piano in the form of a distinctive melody. The theoretical framework of the research dealt with previous studies related to the research topic, then the author’s life, style, most important works, and a brief about ragtime.

The research followed the descriptive analytical approach for the two ragtime pieces (Black and White) (Old Crow) for the piano (the research sample). The applied framework also came and dealt with the analytical study (theoretical and instrumental) of George Botsford’s piano pieces and presented the necessary suggestions and instructions to overcome some of the performance difficulties that those pieces included. The research concluded with the research results, their interpretation, and recommendations