Ahead Of The Curve

Notes, Dec, 1997 by Victor Cardell

Robert Winter’s Crazy for Ragtime was the first CD-ROM produced by Calliope Media, which the author founded with Jay Heifetz, son of violinist Jascha Heifetz. According to the information on Calliope’s Web site (http://www.calliope.com/about), the company’s mission is “to change the way people experience interactive media titles.” Winter has taken significant strides in helping Calliope fulfill its mission with Crazy for Ragtime, which both entertains and educates in a fascinating manner. Those familiar with Winter’s earlier products for Voyager, such as Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony, will again experience the author’s golden touch with multimedia and will be reminded why he is so highly respected as a teacher, performer, and historian.

The curtain frame begins by showing an old map of the United States as a ragtime piece plays in the background. From the map’s location of St. Louis, Missouri, often regarded as the birthplace of classic ragtime, emerges an image of a maple leaf, an obvious reference to Scott Joplin’s popular Maple Leaf Rag. A video box displays a series of brief excerpts from very old black-and-white silent movies, starting with rare footage of the dance known as the cakewalk. Still images of illustrated sheet music title pages and portraits of musicians flash across the motion-picture panel as the title frame opens. Users who want to proceed directly to the title frame can simply hit a key to escape from the curtain frame.

The title frame displays an interactive table of contents on the U.S. map, which now also contains a multiplicity of blinking city names. Clicking on a city displays a captioned illustration of a musician or a piece of sheet music associated with ragtime there
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