Efficiency Rag

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano.
• Who and whenpublished in 1917 by James Scott, an African American composer from Missouri.
• What to listen forthe left hand keeping the beat without fuss, and the right hand playing off the beat above it.

Listen for

• The left hand's walklow notes and chords alternate in an even 'oom-pah', keeping the beat. Start by tuning in to this walk, steady as a clock.
• Syncopation in the right hand: the right hand deliberately plays across the beat. The lift that comes from a precise left hand meeting a free right hand is the flavor of ragtime.
• Several sectionsa classic rag is usually built from several sections of about sixteen bars each, which follow one another and repeat. Try to catch the moment a new tune comes in.

When it was written

In 1910s America, efficiency was a fashionable word. The efficiency movement, which aimed to time and trim work in factories and offices so they could produce more, had spread widely. This note will not claim to know what Scott had in mind when he chose the title. What is clear is that the word was very familiar to people of his day.

The year this piece appeared, 1917, was a turning point for ragtime. That year Scott Joplin, the composer most identified with ragtime, died, and the first jazz records came out as a new music began to draw attention. In the same year the United States entered the First World War. Efficiency Rag came into the world in a year when the times were changing.

The composer, James Scott

James Scott was born in Missouri around 1885. As a young man he worked at a music store in Carthage, Missouri, where his first pieces were published, and later he met the publisher John Stark, who brought out many of his rags. Today he is counted, with Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb, among the three leading composers of classic ragtime. After he later moved to Kansas City he taught piano and played in silent-film theaters, and he died in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1938.