Scott Joplin
1904
Joplin wrote The Cascades for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where a series of ornamental waterfalls — the Grand Cascade — was the centerpiece of the fairgrounds. Twenty million people visited the fair. They ate hot dogs, rode the observation wheel, saw the first public demonstration of wireless telegraphy, and possibly heard ragtime piano drifting from one of the many entertainment venues scattered across the twelve-hundred-acre site. Whether Joplin performed at the fair himself is debated. What's certain is that he captured the cascades in music with a literalness that borders on painting.
The descending runs in the right hand — rapid, sparkling, evenly spaced — sound exactly like water falling over a series of ledges. It's programmatic music in the ragtime tradition, which is a genre combination that shouldn't exist and works brilliantly. Joplin applies the same formal rigor he brings to every composition — four distinct strains, each with its own character, connected by the recurring water imagery — but the effect is more impressionistic than his other rags. Debussy was doing similar things with water in Reflets dans l'eau around the same time. Neither composer knew about the other.
The St. Louis World's Fair was also the event where ice cream cones, iced tea, and cotton candy were popularized, which means the same cultural moment that introduced twenty million Americans to mass-produced sugar also provided the backdrop for some of the finest ragtime ever composed. America has always processed its contradictions through spectacle, and the 1904 fair was spectacle on an industrial scale.
The Cascades won a prize at the fair, though the details of what prize and how much it was worth have been lost. Joplin published it through Stark, as usual, and it sold steadily without approaching the Maple Leaf phenomenon. It's a quieter piece — more contemplative, less rhythmically aggressive — and it reveals a side of Joplin that the rag-piano stereotype obscures: a man who could sit in front of a waterfall and hear music in it, which is not a ragtime skill but a composer's skill, and the distinction matters.
Recording: Ralph Sutton, piano (Down Home Records, 78 rpm). Public domain in the EU; still protected in the US until 2067, so it is not offered to US visitors. Source: https://archive.org/details/78_the-cascades_ralph-sutton-scott-joplin_gbia0101687a