Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Lynes

Calling ragtime a "fanfare" flatters the music while also sneaking in a claim about history: this wasn’t background entertainment, it was an announcement. Lynes, a midcentury critic with a talent for packaging cultural shifts into crisp metaphors, frames ragtime as the opening brass blast of modern America. The word choice matters. A fanfare is short, bright, public-facing - designed to grab attention and signal arrival. Ragtime, with its syncopation and buoyant swagger, performs that same work culturally: it tells listeners that the old meter, the old manners, the old century’s sense of order is about to be teased, bent, and eventually replaced.

The subtext is that the 20th century’s signature energies - speed, urban crowds, mass leisure, commodified novelty - can be heard before they’re fully seen. Ragtime emerges alongside vaudeville circuits, sheet-music empires, and player pianos: early technologies and markets that make style reproducible, portable, and contagious. That’s the century speaking in advance: art as a product, rhythm as a kind of advertising, pleasure as a civic fact.

There’s also a deliberate smoothing-over in the grandeur of "fanfare". It elevates a form rooted in Black musical innovation and often mediated through white publishing and performance. Lynes’ metaphor celebrates ragtime’s forward thrust while sidestepping the century’s contradictions: modernity arriving with irresistible charm, and with the unequal power structures that help decide who gets credited for the sound of the future.