Scott Joplin was really the one person who tied Ragtime with the classical music of the Late Romantic Period; if he wasn't around to do that, the next generation of composers like Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, and later Grappeli, Hitler, and George, wouldn't have been influenced as much by American genres as OTL. Without the influences of Ragtime and its derivatives, ATL's Expressivist classical music would have been much different.