Rag Sentimental

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano.
• Who and whenpublished in 1918 by James Scott, an African American composer from Missouri.
• What to listen forover an evenly walking left hand, how softly or how crisply the right hand's off-beats come through.

Listen for

• The left hand's walklow notes and chords alternate in an even 'oom-pah', keeping the beat. This walk is the floor of ragtime.
• Syncopation in the right hand: the right hand deliberately plays across the beat. The same syncopation can sound giddy or wistful depending on the performance. Look for the moments that take on a sentimental color, as the title suggests.
• 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 moments when one section gives way to the next.

When it was written

Ragtime is piano music that arose among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. People bought sheet music and enjoyed new pieces on the piano at home, and that is how ragtime spread across America.

By around 1918, when this piece appeared, the ragtime era had nearly run its course. A year earlier, in 1917, Scott Joplin, the composer most identified with ragtime, had died, and with the first jazz records people's ears were turning to a new music. The United States had been fighting in the First World War since 1917, and the fighting stopped in November 1918. Rag Sentimental is a piece from the time when an era was ending.

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.