One of America's leading "serious" composers, William Bolcom has also had a strong interest in classic American popular music, especially ragtime. Graceful Ghost, his most popular composition, sprang from that interest. Bolcom's earlier career was centered on New York City and Yale University. While in New York, he investigated the great compositions of the ragtime era (roughly 1890 to 1925), exemplified by composers such as Joplin, Turpin, Hayden, and others. His investigation into their proper interpretation (especially Joplin's recurring but widely overlooked admonition never to play ragtime fast) led him to becoming a leading pianist in the ragtime revival of the 1960s, along with Paul Jacobs and Joshua Rifkin, among others. Among the items Bolcom recorded was his own set of Three Ghost Rags, a commemoration of his late father. Graceful Ghost, with a stately, benign melody and a wistful sense of loss, was the breakout hit of the album on which it appeared and has remained Bolcom's most widely known composition. (The other two "ghost rags" are Poltergeist and Dream Shadows.)

In 1979, Bolcom prepared the violin version, which he and Sergiu Luca played in 1981. It eschews bravura effects, instead concentrating on the violin's lyrical qualities in sonorities, mainly at mezzo piano and quieter. There appears to be a slight expansion of the piece in this version, including a little more material in the accompaniment to compensate for the lines that are lifted from the original piano piece to the violin. However, the violin does not simply take all the melodic material. Instead, the melodies pass weightlessly from the keyboard to the violin, requiring close interpretive sympathy and each instrumentalist's ability to pick up the other's phrasing and dynamics. Lacking that quality, the music becomes earthbound, preventing the ghost from serenely floating in the violin part.

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In the late '60s, there arose a renewed interest in the music of the greatest ragtime composer, Scott Joplin. The exploration of this master's oeuvre spurred several American composers to write rags of their own, including William Bolcom. His Ghost Rags of 1970, which were named as a set by the pianist Paul Jacobs, have become the best-loved of his ragtime explorations, and Bolcom invests these essays in old-time music with style and wit. Bolcom wrote the first of these rags, Graceful Ghost, in memory of his father, and it has become his single most famous work. The ghost who stalks these pages is indeed a graceful and welcome presence. An elegant melodic curve, gentle minor-mode harmonies, and an expert use of the flowing syncopations of ragtime rhythm make the piece feel wistful and noble at the same time. Bolcom has also prepared a very effective transcription for violin and piano of this rag. The second Ghost Rag, titled Poltergeist (Rag Fantasy), does not make an outward show of being haunting but nevertheless sounds more ghostly, with suspended appoggiaturas, unexpected harmonies, and syncopations that snap a bit more than those of Graceful Ghost. The music takes several entertaining jaunts down long hallways to dead ends before reluctantly coming to a conclusion. Dream Shadows concludes the Ghost Rags. One writer has described it as a "white telephone rag," and of the three rags in the set this one is the most redolent of the old-time serials. Slower and sweeter than the other two, it still comes with surprising harmonies, tricky syncopations, and langorous melodies that might provide numerous opportunities for some smoky-eyed heroine to toss her hair. Bolcom's Ghost rags are charming and thorougly idiomatic, not exercises at all but tributes, of the highest order, to a neglected American music. Their musical language subtly updates that of Joplin without in the least sacrificing its character.

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