Searchlight Rag

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for piano in B-flat major. It takes about three minutes to hear from start to finish.
• Who and whenwritten by Scott Joplin and published in 1907, around the time he was moving to New York.
• What to listen forthe even step of the left hand, the right hand slipping off the beat, and the moments when a new section opens up.

Listen for

• The left hand's stepin a rag the left hand usually alternates a low bass note with a chord in the middle of the keyboard. That steady oom-pah is the floor the whole piece stands on.
• Right-hand syncopationsyncopation means putting the push just ahead of where the strong beat should land. Listen for places where the right-hand tune jumps out a step before the beat. It may feel like the beam suddenly swinging in a new direction.
• Where the sections change: rags are usually built like marches, from several short sections joined one after another. When a new section comes in, listen for whether the melody sits higher or lower, or sounds brighter or darker.

When it was written

Ragtime grew up among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. This piano music, which laid syncopated rhythm over the frame of the march, sold widely as sheet music, and people sat down at the piano at home to try out the latest rags.

Joplin was born in Texas around 1868. His father, a former slave, worked as a railroad laborer. As a young man Joplin travelled the Midwest playing piano, and in the 1890s he settled in Sedalia, Missouri. He made his name in 1899 with the Maple Leaf Rag, and in 1902 he published The Entertainer.

Around 1907, the year this piece appeared, Joplin moved to New York. The following year, 1908, he published School of Ragtime, a set of exercises on how to play the music. On a number of his scores he also printed a warning not to play ragtime fast. So it is worth hearing this piece at an unhurried walk, too.

Scott Joplin, the composer

Joplin's ambitions reached well beyond a single rag. In 1911 he paid to publish the score of his opera Treemonisha, but he never saw a proper staging of it in his lifetime. By the time he died in New York in 1917, popular taste was already moving toward jazz. His music became widely known again through the 1973 film The Sting, and in 1976 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.