Our story begins last August, when I bought a used piano off CraigsList. I've had a piano for most of my life, but only intermittently since moving to Seattle. I had intended to get one since we first moved into this house, but somehow I kept putting it off for two years, the longest I've ever gone without.

In the past I've usually had my bookshelf full of music right next to the piano, but this time my household geography was different: except for what could fit in the piano bench, all the music resided in another room. A small collection of favorite books ended up in the bench, and I ended up playing mostly from them. One of them was my book of Scott Joplin rags.

I've had this since I was a child, or at least our family had it. The book was published in 1972 (second edition), and we must have bought it not long after that. I'm pretty sure the copy I have is the original, though I know my sister has a copy of the same book. All three of us played a lot of Joplin as kids. In retrospect I realize I almost never played the pieces my brother played and vice versa. Whether I was deliberately avoiding his territory or he was avoiding mine, I don't know. The exception is Bethena, which all three of us played. My main memory of my sister with Joplin is that she and I would often play rags as duets with me playing the right hand part and her playing the left hand, a tradition we have continued to occasionally repeat as adults.

The book is properly titled The Collected Works of Scott Joplin: Volume I. Volume one is for Joplin's works for piano, which the publishers surely must have known would sell better than volume two, works for voice. The latter is of interest mostly to scholars, and consists mostly of the piano-vocal score of Joplin's opera Treemonisha. Many years later I borrowed volume two from a library. As a big fan of Joplin and a big fan of opera, I thought the idea of an opera by Joplin sounded very exciting. In fact, it was a big letdown. For one thing, it's not very "operatic", being more in the operetta-ish style of, say, Reginald de Koven. For another, it wasn't particularly good. Joplin was genius as a composer of ragtime, but as an opera songwriter he was run of the mill. I like turn-of-the-century American operetta as much as the next guy — actually, I like it considerably more than most people do, even limiting the comparison to the small minority who have any opinion on it at all — but there's nothing special there.

But I digress. Some time last fall, I got the idea in my head that I'd play through the entire book from start to finish. Since I had played very little Joplin in the past 10 years, this would be a fun trip down memory lane. I wasn't even sure if I had played every rag in the book. Indeed, I'm still not sure. Many were familiar from my own playing or from hearing my brother's; many others were felt unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean I never played them once or twice way back when.

In the course of playing through, I noticed that some that I thought I liked weren't as good as I remembered, and others I thought I didn't like were better than I remembered. That gave me the new idea of picking out a top ten list of favorite and ranking them. So I played through the whole book again, though skipping quickly through the obvious chaff and taking notes on the better ones. I spent much of January playing the top candidates over and over until they fell into a ranking.

Whenever I read music criticism or analysis, I ponder the question of why such writings are usually so wretched and unreadable. Since most of my musical readings are from the classical genre, I am often driven to ask: Must every music critic be an insufferable blowhard spouting meaningless academic nonsense? But then on reflection, I wonder if the fault isn't with the writer so much as with the subject. Perhaps the aesthetics of music is such a personal and non-verbal subject that it isn't easily expressed in words, and whatever words are chosen don't do a very good job of conveying what the writer had in mind. Maybe what seems like nonsensical drivel is actually intelligent opinion that would make sense to me if only it could be communicated telepathically directly from the author, but when put into words on paper too much is lost in the translation.

Being on the other side of the equation now, I wonder if my own descriptions will seem just as nonsensical to my readers. Here in my Joplin list, if I say that one rag has good "story" while another does not, is my reader going to ask, "'Story'? What the heck does that mean?"

As I hope many of you know — and if you don't know this, I'm afraid this very specialized post will mean little or nothing to you — Scott Joplin wrote ragtime. Indeed, the "King of Ragtime" so far outshines all other authors that he practically defines the genre.

The rag, like the sonata or the rondo, is a very restricted form. A properly constructed rag has four themes. Each theme is exactly 16 bars and each theme is repeated without variation. Typically, the second theme is followed by a single repeat of the first theme. The right hand always carries the melody, while the left hand carries the harmony. The left hand keeps a steady beat, typically in an "oom-pah" pattern of bass notes alternating with chords, while the right-hand melody is typically heavily syncopated. Throughout the entire piece, there is little or no variation in tempo (a vestige of the genre's dance origins).

Of course there is no enforcer compelling the composer to follow all of these rules, and indeed there are many many exceptions throughout the ragtime corpus. But whenever one departs from the pattern, one loses a little bit of what makes a rag a rag. Too much variation and it's no longer a rag. The ragtime formula works. If you depart from the formula, what you get instead may or may not work.

But at the same time, the formula severely limits what one can do artistically. The oom-pah plus melody can become quite dull very quickly. The obligatory repeats don't allow much freedom to develop a theme. The unchanging tempo makes it hard to express any variety of emotion. And while there's nothing to prevent one from alternating between loud and soft, the general uniformity of mood and tempo doesn't easily lend itself to dynamic variety that is meaningful.

Because a typical rag consists of four otherwise unrelated themes chained end to end, it is a challenge for a rag to be more than the sum of its parts. There isn't much scope for making each theme meaningfully follow the previous one, as opposed to being tacked together in some other order, or mixed and matched with themes from other rags. Many of Joplin's rags (and many more rags by other composers) I would say fail on this count. Where they succeed, Joplin had a variety of strategies, but the commonest pattern tended to give each theme a certain characteristic. The first theme, which besides introducing the piece is usually the only one to recur later, wants to have a friendly and accessible sound. The second theme wants a sense of progress as if it is taking us somewhere. The third theme is usually the most interesting harmonically, and often the most exciting in general; this is where we often get lots of dominant sevenths with chromatics from outside the main key. The fourth theme needs to have a sense of completion, either as a satisfying denouement from the climactic third theme, or by carrying the climax even further and driving it home with a flourish.

This is not the only strategy, but the point of it or any other strategy is to give the rag a feeling of completeness and direction that makes it more than just four themes played in succession. That is what I mean by "story".

The challenge for any rag is to cope with the limits of the ragtime form. The rags on my list succeed in one of two ways. Either they stay within the form and find a way to be beautiful in spite of the limits (eg, Easy Winners), or they push the envelope and expand the form without breaking it, either a little (eg, Maple Leaf) or a lot (eg, Solace). Likewise, the rags that fail to be great can fail in one of two ways. In a few adventurous rags, the innovation doesn't quite work and the result is a mess (eg, Euphonic Sounds). More often, they are safely within bounds but remain limited by it. Of these latter, there are many.

Lest I be misunderstood, I want to clarify that where I say a rag "fails" I don't mean it's really a failure. Almost all of Joplin's rags are good, and many of the ones that don't make my top ten list are still very good, they're just not quite as good as the top ten. Among Joplin's piano works there is very little that I would say is actually "bad", and even that isn't nearly as bad as bad ragtime by other composers.

When we were kids we had another book titled "Ragtime Rarities" with rags by composers other than Joplin. (I probably still have that book, packed away in a box somewhere.) Some of those were really awful. My sister and I, having fun with the book's title, liked to comment after trying a particularly bad one, "wow, that one is really rare!". Even the worst of Joplin never came close to those. He isn't the king for nothing.

For further discussion Joplin rags, I recommend Perfessor Bill Edwards' ragtime website. I know Joplin fairly well, but the Perfessor knows him way better than I ever will. He offers brief opinions on every rag, and some of his differ sharply from mine.

I mention this here, ahead of my own commentary, only because I know some of my readers may want to listen along to the pieces. If you're going to do that, your best bet on the Internet is Perfessor Bill's midi files. A midi file is not the same as a wav or mp3 sound file. It does not record the actual sound; rather it records data describing notes, duration, dynamics, etc, and plays them back using your own computer's resources. Among other things, this means that if your computer has a crappy piano midi patch (which it probably doesn't, since almost every operating system has a decent piano nowadays), the midi files will sound like they're being played on a crappy instrument.

The reason you want Perfessor Bill's midi files instead of someone else's is because he has provided sophisticated midi data that incorporates nuances of dynamic, tempo, etc, so that it actually sounds like a real person is playing. (Indeed, I assume the Perfessor really did play the pieces, on a special keyboard designed to capture the performance as midi data.) There are other sites offering Joplin midi files, but these are simple transcriptions from the notes on the page, so they are "played" mechanically with no human interpretation. Ragtime suffers quite a bit less from a mechanical interpretation than does most music, but even so, some of these plain midi files sound awful. Listening to these them is a good reminder of how important human interpretation is in any genre of music.

If you're listening along with Perfessor Bill, you should know that he takes great liberties with the music. Not only does he add considerable ornamentation, but he doesn't hesitate to change notes and rewrite wherever he sees fit. His Maple Leaf, for instance, is rather drastically rearranged. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm not well-versed in ragtime musicology, but I know there are plenty of other genres where the composer never intended the music to be played exactly as written, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's true of ragtime as well. I mention it only because what the Perfessor plays might not always coincide with what I discuss here. I'm judging the rags strictly by how they are written and published.

It has become traditional when announcing rankings to list them in reverse order. This creates some suspense, but only paradoxically. True, you have to wait longer to hear the top choices, but along the way you have narrowed the competition so the only real suspense is the order of the top few. Unless your list is short, by the time you reach number one, there's no doubt who it will be: the nine next-best have already been ruled out. Of the candidates remaining, one will get the top spot and the others will be omitted entirely. Unless the competition is extremely clumped at the top, it will be pretty obvious.

If you're actually going to sit down and play them all, I do recommend going last to first, but for listing them here I prefer to simply start at the top.

1. Solace: A Mexican Serenade (April 28, 1909). This is truly Joplin's masterpiece, and it's not even close. Many rags succeed by having four themes all of above average quality. Others succeed by having one extraordinary theme while the others are decent. In Solace, all four themes are extraordinary, brilliant even, and expertly crafted as well. Everything about the piece is perfection.

Besides being the best, Solace is unique in Joplin's canon in several ways. Technically, the left hand plays a tango rhythm in three of the four themes. That rhythm is used a little bit in Wall Street, but nowhere else that I can think of.

Stylistically, Solace has a softness that most Joplin pieces lack. Ragtime is not a romantic genre. Here and there among Joplin's works, one might find bits of lyricism or romantic lushness, but even those aren't very deep. Solace goes way beyond that. The entire piece is deeply sentimental, suffused with a serene beauty.

Solace was featured prominently in the sound track for the movie The Sting. It is used in places that require music that is poignant and emotionally evocative. It's hard to imagine anything else by Joplin could have served the same purpose. In contrast, one can easily imagine a dozen other themes that might have replaced the first movement of the Entertainer as the main theme.

2. Bethena: A Concert Waltz (March 6, 1905). As a general rule, I don't care for Joplin's waltzes (nor for his marches, which are typically written in 6/8). Like his contemporary, John Philip Sousa, Joplin wants to write in triple meters, and he never stops trying, but he only really shines in 4/4 or 2/4. And yet Bethena is a prominent exception. It's the only Joplin waltz that's any good at all, and it's marvelous.

Like Solace, Bethena is an outlier among Joplin's works, unlike anything else he wrote. It is easily the most complete and polished of Joplin's works, very thoroughly and formally constructed, like a Mozart sonata. The label "concert waltz" suggests what Joplin was aiming for. Though not nearly equal in scope, in style it's a lot like a Chopin waltz. (I'm thinking of the one in Eb, opus 18).

Joplin completely breaks the ragtime mold with this one, so much that it's hardly a rag at all. It has five themes, structured A-BB-A-CC-DDEE-A, with episodes in bridging all the gaps. The whole piece is Mozartean — recalling the anecdotal idea of every note being exactly right, neither too many nor too few — but it's the exquisite little episodes that are most Mozartean at all. Breaking the mold allows Joplin to avoid the usual shortcomings of ragtime. Whereas rags are typically just now loud, now soft, with punctuated accents, Bethena has real depth of dynamic. And it has a story arc that few if any rags match.

3. Wall Street Rag (Feb 23, 1909). As special as Solace is, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Wall Street, which preceded it by only a few months, is similar in both style and structure, and it's an excellent work for most of the same reasons. In pure inspiration, the fourth theme is one of the best Joplin wrote, as well as one of the jazziest. It is his most audacious as well as the most successful use of what were called "crazy chords" (ie, tightly spaced chords with lots of added 6th, 7ths or 9ths resulting in clusters, but written high enough above the bass root that they're still basically concordant) giving a sort of raucous, jangly feel.

Uniquely, it is published with little text notes telling a pseudo-story (about Wall Street brokers reacting to ups and downs of the market). I don't hate these as much as Rudi Blesh does. I think they're sort of cute, so long as you don't try to take them too seriously. Any failure of the specific Wall Street imagery shouldn't hide the truth that this piece tells a good story, moving neatly from mood to mood in satisfying progression. In many ways it's more exciting than its sister piece, Solace, but it doesn't quite achieve the latter's pure beauty.

4. Elite Syncopations (Dec 29, 1902). Ragtime is feel-good music. A good measure of a rag is whether it makes you smile. Elite Syncopations makes you smile from beginning to end. This is the best of Joplin's early works, in my estimation even beating out his smash hit. All the themes are solid, and they're put together in a way that makes the whole greater than its parts. Elite Syncopations stays very true to the standard rag form, and there's nothing really novel or daring about it. The first three themes are mostly unadorned one-note melodies with traditional accompaniment, which nicely sets up the booming and exuberant fourth theme. There's no great novelty or gimmickry here. It's just a very well-written traditional rag that bubbles over with pure joy.

5. Maple Leaf Rag (Sept 18, 1899). Before The Sting, this was easily Joplin's most celebrated rag. Unlike the Entertainer, it deserves its reputation. Maple Leaf was Joplin's first and greatest hit. That's an understatement. Maple Leaf was the blockbuster hit of the decade. It put Joplin on the map. It put ragtime on the map. It was the first non-vocal sheet music to sell a million copies in the United States.

The Maple Leaf Rag came surprisingly early in Joplin's career. Before it, he published only four other works; three of those are junk, and the fourth (the Original Rags) were actually written after Maple Leaf but published sooner. Maple Leaf is startlingly mature for its time period. Although it doesn't go as far as Joplin's later works, it's noticeably more sophisticated than most of the rags that followed for the next several years.

Maple Leaf would stand out in any case, But what really sets Maple Leaf apart is its excellent bass line. It seems almost trivial now, when compared to more obvious innovations that followed, but Maple Leaf broke the rag out of the oom-pah mold. If you're a pianist, read through Maple Leaf playing just the left-hand part and notice how musically interesting it is. Then play the left-hand part of the Peacherine Rag (Joplin's next big hit) and see how dull it is in comparison.

The bass line is why Peacherine is OK and Maple Leaf is brilliant. (It's also what gives Elite Syncopations' fourth theme its climactic feeling of completely breaking out.) The listeners of the time may not have analyzed it so, but they surely felt the difference. Joplin's improved bass lines, full of movement and accent, is what gave his rags that extra oomph that had been missing. That, in turn, is what turned the rinky-dink dance-club genre into a real musical movement. It's also what made Joplin the master of the genre. Throughout his work, it is his mastery of the bass line that really sets him apart.

Besides that, Maple Leaf has four strong themes and it's extremely well-crafted. Joplin worked on this piece for many years before it was published, and one senses that he took all that time to be sure that every note was as good as it could be. (With later works, after his fame was secured, he wasn't always so careful.)

6. Pine Apple Rag (Oct 12, 1908). If early rags like Maple Leaf and Elite Syncopations are Joplin's Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, and the brilliant works from his later period like Solace and Wall Street are his Aïda and Otello, then the Pine Apple is his Ballo in Maschera, pointing the way from the one to the other. The traditional (and somewhat dull) first theme is rooted in the past, but the other three are all inspired and point to where Joplin is going: The jangly second and exuberant fourth themes hint at Wall Street, and the uncharacteristically low and mellow third theme hints at Solace. On its own Pine Apple is a good solid rag, packing lots of novelty without breaking the mold.

7. Gladiolus Rag (Sept 24, 1907). Joplin wrote several rags which, consciously or unconsciously, imitate the Maple Leaf — either in the overall structure of the whole or just in the first theme, with its very characteristic pattern (ie, a two-bar melody, repeated; two sparse bars that stop the flow, usually in minor or diminished harmony; two ascending bars, made up of a half-bar figure repeated in four octaves; and finally a four-bar melody, played first in the upper octave then repeated in the lower octave). The worst of these (eg, Leola) feel like a cheap ripoff, but the better ones make you smile and say, "Hey, that's kinda nice ... reminds me of Maple Leaf."

The best of the Maple Leaf clones is Gladiolus. It's a glorious rag for pretty much the same reasons Maple Leaf is: strong themes, strong bass line. The last two themes work especially well in Gladiolus. Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus is written thick. Some rags (eg, Elite Syncopations) shine with simple one-note melodies, like a pretty little babbling brook. Gladiolus, like Maple Leaf, is a gushing river, flowing with big handfuls of notes. The third theme of Gladiolus is as grandiose as Joplin ever gets. (Again, I'm reminded of Chopin; this time a ballade or maybe a polonaise.) Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus reaches its climax in the third theme, but rather than just dropping off after that, the fourth theme is written in a way that feels like it continues to coast blissfully on the waves created by that climax.

In some ways Gladiolus is better than Maple Leaf. It's certainly bolder, but it's also less refined. I find it hard to judge in isolation, knowing as I do that Maple Leaf is the original and Gladiolus is the imitation. If I could hear the two rags for the first time not knowing which came first, would I consider Gladiolus the superior work? I really don't know.

8. The Easy Winners: A Ragtime Two Step (Oct 10, 1901). The Easy Winners is the purest example of mastering the traditional ragtime form. It is a simple piece with very little innovation, but it is so artfully crafted that it gleams with its simplicity. It's also one of only two* Joplin rags in which I feel any bond between the music and its title. With most rags, there is no connection whatsoever: the Maple Leaf, Pine Apple and Gladiolus rags, for example, have nothing at all to do with their respective botanical eponyms.

The cover illustration for the Easy Winners shows four little illustrations of sporting events: a baseball scene, a football scene, some jockeys racing on horses, and some racing yachts. Given that little visual hint, I find the music very reminiscent of a sporting campaign. Each new theme tells of an episode on the way toward the championship, another challenge successfully met, culminating in the exuberant celebratory final theme.

That final theme is surely the best, one of my favorites in all of Joplin, but it's made all the sweeter by the journey. Knowing the piece as I do, I find myself smiling in anticipation through the first three themes, knowing how it will end. And yet, I'm in no hurry to get there, happy to play every repeat because the whole process is so much fun. Somehow it feels right to know how the piece will end. There is no drama in this campaign, no dark moment of crisis, no doubt. These winners are easy winners. The great charm of the piece is the tone of easy confidence that pervades it.

*(The other is The Cascades — named for a monumental fountain display at the 1904 World Expo in St Louis, not the mountains in Washington and Oregon — which has a few instances of waterfallish tone painting. I suppose "Solace" is descriptive, too. The Wall Street Rag, in spite of it's attempt at a written storyline, really isn't)

9. Rose Leaf Rag: A Ragtime Two Step (Nov 15, 1907). There are three Joplin rags omitted from my book. I'm told that newer editions of the complete works include them, but when the collection was first published in 1971 many of the rags were still under copyright protection, and the publisher was unable to reach terms with the owner of these three. All three have long since come into the public domain and with a little effort they can be found on the Internet. In the course of my ranking, I hunted them down and added them to the audition.

The Rose Leaf Rag is strongly reminiscent of the Wall Street Rag, which followed a little more than a year later. In all four themes it shows distinct and direct similarities, which makes it hard to play the one without thinking of the other. Like the talented boy with an even more talented older brother, poor Rose Leaf suffers in comparison. It's hardly fair. If Wall Street didn't exist, I'm sure I'd appreciate Rose Leaf even more than I do. It has four excellent themes (especially the second theme, which I love), but when I play the third and most especially the fourth theme, I can't help thinking that, as good as this is, I know that Wall Street is even better.

10. Weeping Willow: Ragtime Two Step (June 6, 1903). This is another early rag that succeeds by making the most of the traditional form rather than breaking out of it. What sets it apart is its sense of unhurried, casual elegance, which is rare in ragtime. All four themes are nice, but if there's a weakness it's that there's no real climax. Easy Winners and Elite Syncopations, the two on my list that are in the same style as Weeping Willow, both end with an energetic fourth theme that brings down the curtain as it were. Willow's fourth theme is nice but doesn't have the same power.

Two of Joplin's rags — the Maple Leaf and the Pine Apple — were also arranged and published as songs with lyrics. If ever saw these in volume two, I don't remember them. I suspect they were chosen for their sellability, not their singability; neither tune seems an obvious candidate for vocal adaptation. The one Joplin rag that feels to me like it wants to be sung is the Weeping Willow. Though ragtime is almost always melodious, it's rarely cantabile. Willow is an exception. It's like a serenade. A serenade on the veranda on a lazy summer evening.

There are many, but they can wait for another day. This post is long enough.

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