Amuck rag

In a few past posting, diatonic scale, chromatic scale and diminished chords transformed themselves to ragtimes. But enough is enough, I said, and stopped writing ragtimes. Yet, an augmented chord took hold of my mind and wanted also its share of syncopation. However, I refused—and so the chord ran amuck.

Amuck Rag:

• PDF
• MIDI

Here is a video of my attempt to play my composition—I confess that I do not wholly succeed! If you can do it better, I might be inclined to send you some small gift!

Diminished rag

Diatonic scale, chromatic scale—what else could be a motif for a ragtime? Of course: A diminished chord, i.e., stacked minor thirds:

So, here is the Diminished Rag! It's a rag, but, well, not really a first class piece, I've to confess. But—so what? For people who are a little bit interested in composing, I tell a few tales from the rag's construction—at least its first eight bars, which I built with some enthusiasm and somewhat technically.

So I had this chord of minor thirds. Now, something had to happen with it! In a minor key, this chord can be dissolved to the tonic—voila! An inversion reinforces the c minor key:

Next step? A sequence is never wrong (in a ragtime, at least). Diminished chord in c minor, dissolved now to ... to ... aha: b flat minor:

But ... now we are in b flat minor—yet, we want to continue the piece in its c minor key. How to get back? Idea: The d flat—the uppermost note of the last chord—is the ninth of the dominant ninth chord of f minor—which is half of the way back to c minor! So using this pattern twice, I nicely loop back to c minor!

In some more detail: Dropping the bass note of the ninth chord in a minor key, one gets a "crippled ninth chord" (my name), which is, note-wise, the same as a diminished chord—here, one can see this chord in the last bar::

Same trick again: The short scale in f minor leads up to an a-flat; building the "crippled ninth" with this note gives us the dominant ninth of c minor, and a short scale and cadence leads us to the c minor chord:

Actually, I pushed another diminished chord into the final cadence (after all, it's the "Diminished Rag"!)—see PDF and MIDI below (there is also a harmonic explanation of this chord—but do we want to explain all the chords? No!)

Second subject: In C major, of course (of course? well, a ragtime should have some brightness to it, so a major key is certainly not wrong):

Nothing special, except that the subject started a journey of its own ... beginning of the "not first-class piece character." After a few meanders, I somehow manage to return to c minor, and the first subject can be repeated. However, at its end, it wanders off into a sequence of perpetual diminished chords going to neverwhere—a simple method of composing (or rather, "composing" in quotation marks?). A double diminution creates the necessary climax at the end, two falling chords (diminished ones, of course), and that's it!

Here is

• a PDF file of the "Diminished Rag"
• and a MIDI file of it

Honestly, this is probably a textbook example of how not to write a piece of music to be taken earnestly. If you want, you can write down all the items that are more or less wrong with it. Among others: It is barely a minute long, and still tries to be four things at once::

1. Ragtime
2. Tango
3. Minuet
4. Virtuoso

So what could one (I) do with this piece? On the one hand: Play it nevertheless—exactly because it is such a mingle-mangle of different ideas, this might be some fun! On the other hand: Use it as a quarry of ideas to be reused somewhere else ...

Accidental rag

In a previous posting, I suggested to start one's music-composing career with ragtimes: It helps to restrict oneself regarding

• harmonies (I-IV-V and a few V-of-Vs, i.e. II dominants),
• accompaniments (stride),
• forms (A-A', A-B-A)
• and rhythm ("standard ragtime syncopations").

Concerning the voices, there should be some attempt at a bass melody; and interruptions in the melody (e.g. because of longer notes) should be covered with small counter melody pieces. I assembled an initial piece of a ragtime in that last posting ...

... but then I felt I'd like to write more of it! Next melodic idea? Instead of the diatonic scale, I could use a chromatic one! Again, it got a standard ragtime syncopation:

Then I sat down at the piano and wanted to try out what could evolve from it. What I wanted was a standard stride using f-c as the bass line —but I was somewhat clumsy, and my little finger fell on the e near the f—which "inspired" me to the following bass and melodic lines:

That "accident" with the e gave the ragtime its name: Accidental Rag. Only later I realized that the chromatic scale requires quite a lot of accidentals, so that the name is quite fitting also in this respect!

A simple modulation leads to the second theme in A major:

The second theme moves in the opposite way to the first one: Not up and down, but downwards and then upward (this happens in the bass). Because of A major, this even leads to a f double sharp ... which could, using some naturals, be written as g, but the double sharp is formally correct:

In the repetition, the second theme is slightly varied. When the ragtime is played, one must play this part somewhat softly. After the repetition, the first theme returns, but this time it leads quickly into a coda that uses that old trick of a triple repetition to draw out the end—and then it's over.

Here are downloads of the score;

• PDF
• MIDI
• ... and now there is a YouTube video, where I play the ragtime on a church organ. (The recording is sort of a "demo," i.e., the quality is, well, substandard):

Composing music - where to start?

When composing music, it certainly does no harm if one experiments with small exercises. Classical composers had to write scores of minuets—however, nowadays this is a little bit out of fashion. What could we take instead? Here is a suggestion: Write ragtimes.

The best-known ragtime is certainly Scott Joplin's "Entertainer," made famous again by its use in "The Clou" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford (the soundtrack with many other melodies by Scorr Joplin earned an Oscar). John Williams's Cantina Theme from the first Star Wars film is another very famous ragtime, which deviates quite a lot from the old standard ragtime harmonies and chords. Even though the heyday of ragtime has ended a century ago, this music is still attractive enough to be played by some band in every other Clone War series ...

Before writing a ragtime, it probably makes sense to listen to a few rags. Warren Trachtman's site has lots of ragtime MIDIs, and certainly there are enough of them on youtube. However, I found that after listening to fifteen or twenty ragtimes, my musical mind gets somehow clogged up and cannot produce anything intelligible any more—so turn them off soon enough ...

Here is a "recipe" for assembling a ragtime on the typical ragtime instrument, the piano:

1. Take some piece of melody and add enough syncopation.
2. For the accompaniment, use a simple stride on the first and the fifth. In the final part of a phrase, the fifth of the fifth (dominant seventh on the second) fits in quite well.
3. The simplest form of a ragtime is a - a', i.e., a melody, then a slight variation on the melody.
4. After having put together the first version, one should brush up two more melodies: The bass line, i.e., the bass notes of the stride, should become a melody of its own; and longer notes in the main melody can be used to add small counter-melody pieces.
5. A longer form like A-B-A will have place for another melodic idea; or one might even write a long "ragtime rondo" A-B-A-C-A-D-...
6. And that's it!

That's it? But how do you do this exactly? I fear that this question could only be answered in a personal dialogue: Because what needs to be explained or tried out depends very much on what one can do and can't do. The important part is, of course, the second step—harmonization: No shortcuts there! It must simply be done correctly—something that needs training. I do not really know how you learn it, but all people who can do it (myself included) have told me that it takes long, and it needs some teacher. Of course, playing and listening to standard blues is a first step where one learns to hear whether a chord is correct or not, but the few blues chords and chord sequences are not enough training.

However, when you feel somewhat confident with ragtime harmonics, you can of course start all sorts of substitution attempts, leading to more and more jazz-like music: Besides notated ragtime, improvised ragtime was the bed on which jazz started to flourish, where the pianist can more or less bravely digress from the standard I-IV-V(-II) harmonies. Tritone substitutions are most probably going too far for a ragtime, but everything else is certainly worth some trials.

After so many words, there should be some notes. Therefore, for your pleasure (or not), here is an academically constructed part of a ragtime.

The idea for the melody is a simple scale: Up and down. I "invented" it in half a minute while waiting for my train—alternative: assemble it on the piano (or whatever instrument you play):

So that we get a ragtime, we syncopate it—different syncopations in bars one and two are better than just one rhythm! At the end, I tacked on another note to fill up the second bar:

Below our melody, we add a standard stride:

What next? Either we continue with the melody. A simple second part would be a "sequence" (same melody on another note) from which we divert at some point:

Another idea: We continue the bass line. And when we do this, we can leave the boring standard stride and go for some "bass melody" or "bass line." Here is one—the last bar contains the fifth-of-the-fifth or dominant-II I mentioned above:

Using this bass as "input", we must now add some matching melody—"wherever the fingers go" (on the keyboard or in ones head). Here is one of many possibilities:

Done with the first part! Well ... we can look at some old harmonic and counterpoint rules and repair a few glitches:

• At [1], we nicely jump into an eighth (both voices lead from lower notes to an f); possible fix: The upper voice jumps to the a, then "somehow finds its way back." Another possibility: a instead of c as first note. This leads to a counterpoint between accompaniment and melody, and has the additional nice effect that after the very straightforward up-and-down scale suddenly an unexpected high note is introduced.
• At [2], we jump into an fifth (voices go in parallel to c+g); possible fix: bass uses e instead of c.
• At [3]: The d# must, of course, find e as its resolution. However, if we want to repeat the melody (a-a' form), we need a c! Possible fix: We repeat the melody one third higher! Or, more conventional: Replace d#" with g".

Here is an improved version that shows a few of the suggested fixes in red. At the end, I attached an a' part which loops back to the tonic I. In bar 6, the introduction of a new harmony on the off-beat is somewhat questionable—however, I'd like to argue that this works because of the subsequent resolution to a-minor and the accompaniment chord sequence in bar 7: But this might all be questioned. However, this is why there is that "composer in charge"—she or he decides what stays and what not.

And now? Honestly, I'm somewhat lost now: There are no rests or long notes in the melody, so there is little room for counter-melodies. A band arrangement could add a calm middle voice for reeds or flutes, but on the piano this would sound somewhat strange. I leave it at that.

Should we do harmonic analysis now? No—certainly not! We want to compose, not to analyze! But what, then, is this argument that one has to learn all these chords and chord sequences when composing? I repeat: Forget that—no need to know all that. Of course, if you know such things, it will help you to "repair" pieces to make them "better" (according to some rule you want to follow) or, more important, more interesting.

But much more important than knowing these harmonic rules and notations is being able to hear harmonies: "Understand" what's "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "bad" and "normal" and "daring". How you get there, I do not know. Listening (to simple classical music and marches!) and playing (simple classics, straightforward gospel arrangements) and getting criticized is the way to go ... which, I confess, is not really an answer.