Maple Leaf Rag
The Maple Leaf Rag ( English for "maple leaf ragtime"; copyright registered on September 18, 1899) is one of the first and most famous rags for piano by Scott Joplin . The title allegedly refers to the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia (Missouri) , in which Scott Joplin worked for several years as a resident pianist and in which he was discovered in 1899 by the publisher John Stillwell Stark , who then decided to publish Joplin's works. There are also further speculations about the origin of the title.
The piece was an unexpectedly great success - the prophecy “The Maple Leaf Rag will make me the king of the ragtime composers”, which Joplin allegedly gave to his friend Arthur Owen Marshall , came true.
In the first six weeks after publication, the sheet music edition was sold 75,000 times. This eventually grew to more than a million copies. Joplin was the first musician to break this mark.
The piece is in the key of A flat major . The structure follows the structure AA BB A CC DD and thus the basic scheme typical for works of the ragtime genre, whereby the “C” part, which is in the key of D flat major, is referred to as “trio” in the notes. Particularly characteristic is the accompaniment, which in the left hand places unusually high demands on the playing technique of the interpreter , who has to cope with large leaps in intervals in quick succession.
Web links
- Free notes in the Cantorion
- Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime Writers
- Maple Leaf Rag : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
Individual evidence
- ^ Edward Berlin: King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 61f.
- ↑ Delivered in 1899, after Joplin - Ragtimes for piano, Volume 1 , Edition Peters, appendix