The basic elements of ragtime are: (1) a steady underlying 4/4 beat, (2) syncopation in the melody, and (3) some characteristic (often chromatic) harmonies. On the piano, the left hand maintains the steady (unsyncopated) 4/4/ beat, while the right hand introduces the syncopation -- originally imitating two banjos playing together but offset in their beat.

The greatest ragtime composer, in my opinion, was Scott Joplin. Scott was a black, as most but not all of the great ragtimers were. He was born in Texarkana, Texas in 1868 (the year after Canada was born). His family was poor but his father (a railroad worker) played the violin, his mother (a laundress) played the banjo, and his brother the guitar. By the age of 7, Scott spent so much time on a neighbour's piano that his father managed to scrape together the money to buy one. By 11 he was so good that a German music professor (one of Joplin's laundress mother's customers) took an interest in him and gave him free lessons in technique, in harmony, in the great European classics, and in opera. So Joplin's rags were based solidly on classical principles -- and indeed he wrote an opera too (Treemonisha). Scott Joplin left his home in Texarkana at about 15 and began to get employment as a piano player wandering up and down the honky-tonk ragtime territory that flowed up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis. In 1885 he arrived, in fact, in St. Louis. And for the next 10 years he worked out of there as a piano player. Then, at age 26, with a lot of performing experience behind him, he arrived in Sedalia Missouri, another major ragtime centre. Here he worked often at the Maple Leaf Club owned by Will and Walker Williams. It was on their recommendation that he entered Smith College and took lessons in composition and orchestration - and so moved from just playing rags to also composing them. In gratitude, Joplin named one of his first two composed pieces "The Maple Leaf Rag". One day John Stark (a music store owner) walked into the Maple Leaf Club and heard Joplin play. The chance encounter ended up with Stark publishing The Maple Leaf Rag in 1899. It was the first rag to sell over a million copies. It made Joplin famous and Stark rich. Indeed, this was a turning point for the very concept of ragtime 'composition'. Early ragtime, in fact, was not thought of as an individual composition - but rather as bits of melody stitched together by different pianists as they played together late into the night in the honky-tonk districts - like rags stitched together - hence "ragtime". The name 'ragtime' was coined in 1897 (prior to that this type of music had the racist label: 'jig-music').

Joplin rags all have a standard structure: AABBACCDD - with the CCDD part in the dominant key (five notes up from the first section). I was first introduced to The Maple Leaf Rag by a friend in the late 1950s and it was the first rag I learned to play. Subsequently I learned half a dozen of Joplin's amazing rags. And then in the 1970s, as comic relief from a high-pressure job, I composed about a dozen rags for the piano. The first of these was The Beaver Rag (well I needed a Canadian symbol and the maple leaf had already been taken by Joplin!). The Beaver Rag today is scored as either a piano solo or a brass quintet. In A Ragtime Round I have tried to capture some of this ragtime feeling but in a vocal setting.

The classical ragtime period ended in 1917 when Joplin died and America went to war. It was the end of an era. Some of the great ragtime composers lived on. One was Joseph Lamb - until 1960 (I met his widow and children at a Toronto bash of the Ragtime Society some 30 years ago. Another was Eubie Blake (who survived until the mid 1970s). He played at a Toronto Ragtime Society bash as well. But the Lamb and Black (and other ragtime) compositions mostly date back to the earlier, golden period. Well in fact the death knell of ragtime was really sounded earlier. When Irving Berlin brought out Alexander's Ragtime Band (which was not ragtime at all) in 1911, this was the signal that Sedalia, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago were finished as ragtime centres. Now Tin Pan Alley in New York would take over with its commercialized versions (That Lovin' Rag, That Tired Rag, That Pleasin' Rag, That Tuneful Rag, That Fascinatin' Rag). So in fact the golden age of ragtime was only from about 1895 to 1910 - a mere decade and a half.