The Rose-bud March

At a glance

• What it isa march for solo piano, in G major.
• Who and whenwritten by Scott Joplin and published in 1905.
• What to listen forthe even, marching stride, and where this piece is like a rag and where it is not.

Listen for

• The left hand's stridein a piano march the left hand usually alternates a low note and a chord, stepping 'one, two'. It sounds very close to the left hand of a rag. Notice whether that step stays steady all the way through.
• The right-hand tunea rag's right hand gets its lilt from syncopation, rhythm that deliberately pushes ahead of or holds back from the beat. A march tune usually moves more squarely on the beat. Listen for which side this right hand leans toward.
• When a new section arrives: marches are usually built from several sections, and later on there is often a contrasting part called the trio. Listen for how the height and weight of the music change as each new section comes in.

When it was written

In late nineteenth-century America, marches played by brass bands were hugely popular, and people bought march sheet music to play on the piano at home. Ragtime took the frame of the march, the evenly striding left hand and the chain of sections, and laid syncopated rhythm on top of it.

Joplin did not write only rags. He also wrote marches and waltzes, and in 1908 he published School of Ragtime, a set of exercises on how to play it. In the early 1900s he was based in St. Louis, and around 1907 he moved to New York.

The composer Scott Joplin

Joplin was born in Texas around 1868. His father, who had been born into slavery, worked on the railroad, and his mother did domestic work. As a boy he is said to have been taught for free by a music teacher named Julius Weiss. He made his name in 1899 with the Maple Leaf Rag, but his opera Treemonisha, which he published at his own expense in 1911, never received a proper staging in his lifetime. He died in New York in 1917.