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 ...