Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag — published in 1899, and the first instrumental sheet music to let its composer live on royalties: a cent a copy, and it sold hundreds of thousands. Ragtime was then heard as dance-hall noise; Joplin insisted it was written music to be played as written, and had an instruction printed on the score not to take it fast. A hundred and thirty bars as played, four tunes taking turns, with one change of key along the way. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
A penny a copy, and hundreds of thousands of copies
In 1899 Joplin took this piece to John Stark, who ran a music store in Sedalia, Missouri. Stark agreed to publish it and to pay him a cent for every copy sold.
That contract kept him for the rest of his life. Composers then were usually paid once and outright; a royalty made him the first Black composer to live on sheet-music income, and gave him the means to go on writing what he actually wanted to write.
The name comes from where he worked — the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, a social club for Black men, where he played piano.
He was never after mere bustle. Ragtime was thought vulgar by polite society, and Joplin answered by writing it as formal music: sectional, with a key plan, played as written and not improvised. On several of his scores he had the same line printed — it is never right to play ragtime fast. For a century most people have ignored it.
The left hand walks and the right keeps landing in its gaps
The left hand does one thing from beginning to end: bass, chord, bass, chord, one to a beat, like someone walking beside you. That line barely changes.
The right hand deliberately refuses to line up with it. Its accents land in the gaps between the left hand's steps, so you keep feeling slightly off — your body wants to nod along and is pulled half a notch away each time. That displacement is where the music's name comes from.
The opening is the fiercest stretch: wide leaps in the bass and chains of chords driving upward in the right hand. Then a lighter section, lower down, where the walking feel of the left hand becomes clearer.
Around a minute and eleven seconds the colour changes — a new key, the sound suddenly brighter and roomier, with fewer leaps. That is the middle of the piece. Afterwards the dense texture returns to finish.
This will get you moving; it is not quiet background music. Put it on when you need some energy.
Four complete tunes, taking turns
The score is eighty-five bars with four repeated sections and first- and second-time bars; played out as written that becomes a hundred and thirty bars and two thousand four hundred and sixty-four sounding notes, in 2/4 and A-flat major.
A rag is not one tune repeated but several complete tunes set side by side, and the divisions are plain on the page: the first strain from bar 1, played twice; the second from bar 18, played twice with first- and second-time endings; bar 51 is marked TRIO — the middle section, and the only change of key in the piece, also played twice; the last strain from bar 68, likewise repeated.
Across the played-out bars the note count sits mostly between sixteen and twenty-three, so the density is even. Only two places drop to around eight (near bars 9 and 57), and those are the joins between sections.
The range runs from G♯1 to G♯6, five octaves; the shortest note lasts 0.15 seconds — that is easy to follow. What is hard here is not the speed but where the right hand has to be.
The difficulty is the left-hand leap, not the right-hand syncopation
First, the left hand. Every beat it jumps between a bass note and a chord, often more than an octave apart, and it cannot watch the keys — the eyes belong to the right hand. This is where the time goes; practise the left alone until it holds with the eyes shut.
Second, where the right-hand accents fall. Syncopation is not playing faster; it is putting the accent in the wrong place, accurately. Work very slowly and make each accent deliberately, then speed up. As soon as it gets fast the accents crawl back onto the beat by themselves.
Third, do not chase tempo. The score says 100 to the quarter, and Joplin had it printed on several of his scores that ragtime should never be played fast. Slower, you can actually hear how the hands interlock.
Fourth, give the strains separate characters — four tunes should sound like four different people talking, and the one in the new key should ease off. Played at one dynamic throughout, only the bustle survives.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
The same years, in a quieter register
Joplin wrote many more rags — The Entertainer and Ragtime Dance among them — and they will follow on this channel.
If you like this pattern of a regular left hand under a right hand that refuses to line up, Satie's Gymnopédies come from the same years and do the opposite: the same steady accompaniment, with a right hand so slow it hardly moves. All three are already on this channel.
