Scott Joplin teaches ragtime

Sometimes a team of experts and a year of research are needed to determine if the credited author of a document is really the author of the document.

Sometimes there's no doubt at all.



The Library of Congress has in its digital collection a four-page publication titled "School of Ragtime: 6 Exercises for Piano by Scott Joplin." The publication date is 1908 and the cover price is fifty cents.

If you would like six lessons in how to play ragtime from Scott Joplin himself, click here, because there's no doubt, it's really him.

Only the real Scott Joplin would have sounded so prickly, defensive and irritable about what others were doing to his music.

"All publications masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article," the composer writes.

Translation: I don't appreciate third-rate hack writers trying to cash in on my success with their cheap imitations.

"That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered."

Lousy hack players, butchering my work, I hope their fingers break.

"Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at 'hateful ragtime' no longer passes for musical culture."

A thousand rave reviews are forgotten, but every word of a single bad write-up is permanently engraved on my cerebral cortex. Ignorant #$&@$! critic, what has he ever written?

"To assist amateur players in giving the 'Joplin Rags' that weird and intoxicating effect intended by the composer is the object of this work."

Play it right or play something else.

That ends the polite preliminaries and Mr. Joplin proceeds to the first of the six exercises.

"It is evident that, by giving each note its proper time and by scrupulously observing the ties, you will get the effect. So many are careless in these respects that we will specify each feature."

I am so tired of sloppy players. Can't anybody read music?

"Never play ragtime fast at any time."

When it says 'Slow march tempo,' that's not a suggestion.

The exercises teach ragtime by comparing the syncopated notes with an unsyncopated illustration above them.

"The upper staff is not syncopated and is not to be played," Mr. Joplin writes. "The perpendicular dotted lines running from the syncopated note below to the two notes above will show exactly its duration."


Click to enlarge.

"We wish to say here," Mr. Joplin concludes in Exercise No. 6, "that the 'Joplin ragtime' is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often good players lose the effect entirely, by playing too fast. They are harmonized with the supposition that each note will be played as it is written, as it takes this and also the proper time divisions to complete the sense intended."

Translation: Your little improvisations do not amuse me. Play it the way I wrote it.

That is the voice of Scott Joplin, there just can't be any doubt about it.

Anybody else trying to sell music lessons would have written, "Ragtime is fun for all! And YOU can learn to play it in six easy lessons for just fifty cents!"


Copyright 2008

Editor's note: Visit the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia at http://www.loc.gov/performingarts/pae-home.html to see the whole incredible collection. The ragtime collection at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/ragtime/ragtime-home.html includes Scott Joplin sheet music, in case he hasn't scared you off.

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