![]() It's somewhat akin to putting a violin shuffle on some melody. Take some reasonably well-known semi-polyphonic Bach (Toccata D minor BWV565 anybody?) and rag it apart: put a basic sewing machine rhythm in the right hand, organize the left hand to have a semi-walking bass, pull apart all chords in the right hand into clean one-to-three note harmonies, put those parts working with the walking bass line on-beat and the others in between and leave out and fill in material until everything is working out. You work hard on something in that direction and then you figure out that it does not actually sound as good as those minor Joplin/Bach pieces or finger exercises nobody is really interested in hearing any more these days ("Two part inventions" anybody?). Scott Joplin killed ragtime just like Bach killed baroque music, leaving not much leeway to say anything sufficiently impressive. So that's the style I mean when I say baroque." Well, that's sort of like "how do I compose baroque music? My favorite baroque artist is J.S. So that's the style I mean when I say ragtime. My favorite ragtime artist is Scott Joplin. Then try and replicate that in your own patterns. I'd suggest working through your favourite rags, to see how the various sections have similar polyrhythms. It's that shifting accent relative to the steady left-hand rhythm that makes ragtime. third time, half a beat before a downbeat.first time, half a beat after the downbeat,.This shows the syncopation more strongly - we hear the two-note pattern once with the first note on the downbeat, once with the first note just after the upbeat (and the second note on the downbeat), once with the first note on the upbeat.īecause the second note is higher, and the tonic, it feels like the accent of the melody, and it comes (I've fudged melody, but not the timing, of the last three notes, just to squeeze it into three pitches) The first two bars of The Entertainer do the same thing, but with rests in place of some of the melody notes: But, at the end of two bars, the pattern varies, to "reset" and re-anchor the melody to the left-hand. Notice how the melody notes line up with the left hand - it's creating a polyrhythm in which the 3 note "pulse" of the melody comes in and out of phase with the basic left-hand 4/4 rhythm. The Black and White Rag melody (ignoring the intro and the anacrusis and going straight to the main melody) is a 3 note pattern of half-notes: ![]() What makes it ragtime is the syncopated rhythm of the right hand: Pretty much all ragtime has this regular oom-pah backing throughout, along with lead-ins and linking patterns.īut lots of musical styles have a backing just like this. The left hand mostly plays a steady pattern of a bass note on the 1 and 3, and a chord on the 2 and 4. Let's take two archetypal rags - Black and White Rag and The Entertainer.
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