Sugar Cane

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano, in B-flat major.
• Who and whenwritten by Scott Joplin and published in 1908, the same year he brought out School of Ragtime, a set of exercises on how to play rags.
• What to listen forthe steady walk of the left hand, the right hand slipping off the beat, and the moments when a new section begins.

Listen for

• The left-hand walkin a rag the left hand usually alternates a low note and a chord, stepping evenly in two. That walk is the floor the whole piece stands on.
• Right-hand syncopationsyncopation means nudging a note ahead of the strong beat, or leaving the strong beat empty. Listen for the places where the right hand pulls away from the left hand's beat and then locks back in.
• When the section changes: rags are usually built from several sections that follow one another. When the height of the tune or the mood shifts, a new scene is opening.

When it was written

Ragtime is piano music that grew up among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. Its hallmark is syncopated rhythm laid over a march-like frame. With no radio, people bought the sheet music and tried the latest pieces on the piano at home.

Joplin made his name in 1899 with the Maple Leaf Rag, and in 1902 he published The Entertainer. Around 1907 he moved to New York, and this piece came out the following year. School of Ragtime, from that same year, sets out step by step how to play a rag properly. Joplin is also well known for urging players not to play ragtime fast.

Scott Joplin

Joplin was born around 1868 in Texas. His father had been enslaved and worked on the railroad, and his mother did domestic work. As a boy, it is said, he was taught for free by a teacher named Julius Weiss, who introduced him to opera. As a young man he travelled the Midwest as a pianist, and in the 1890s he settled in Sedalia, Missouri.

In 1911 he published his opera Treemonisha at his own expense, 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 moving toward jazz. His music found a wide audience again through the 1973 film The Sting, and in 1976 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.