Something Doing

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for piano, in F major.
• Who and whenScott Joplin wrote it together with the young composer Scott Hayden, and it was published in 1903.
• What to listen forthe steady walk of the left hand, the off-beat right hand, and the moments when a new section begins.

Listen for

• The oom-pah left handin a rag the left hand usually alternates a low bass note and a chord in the middle of the keyboard. This step, borrowed from the march, is the floor the whole piece stands on.
• The syncopated right hand: syncopation shifts the weight away from where the strong beat should fall. Listen for places where the right-hand melody jumps in just ahead of the beat.
• When the section changes: classic rags are usually built from several sections that follow one another and repeat, and the later sections often move to a new key. Listen for the moments when the height of the melody and the mood shift.

When it was written

Ragtime is piano music that grew up among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. With no radio, people bought sheet music and tried new rags on the piano at home, and ragtime sheet music became a huge craze.

Joplin grew up in Texas, and in the 1890s he worked in Sedalia, Missouri. After making his name with the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899, he moved to St. Louis, and in 1902 he published The Entertainer. Something Doing came out the very next year.

In 1908 Joplin published School of Ragtime, a short guide to playing rags. He died in New York in 1917, and his music was largely forgotten for a time. Then his pieces were used in the 1973 film The Sting and found a wide audience again, and in 1976 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.

The co-writer, Scott Hayden

Scott Hayden was a young musician who had been close to Joplin since the Sedalia years. The two wrote other rags together besides this one; the Sunflower Slow Drag, published in 1901, is one of them. Try listening to this piece as a sound made by two people's hands together, and it may come across a little differently.