Noctave
The piece
The subtitle printed on the score, “A Rag Time Two Step”, ties Scott Joplin’s rag to the dance floor. It found a wide new audience in 1973, when Marvin Hamlisch adapted it for the film The Sting. The score carries an instruction that is often forgotten: “Not fast”. Like many rags, it strings together an introduction and several sixteen-bar strains, one of them in F major.
Ragtime rests on a contrast: a left hand as regular as clockwork, alternating a low bass note, often in octaves, with a chord in the middle of the keyboard, beneath a syncopated right hand whose tune lands just beside the beat. The left hand makes 162 leaps in the piece, so practise it alone until it runs by itself. The right hand also plays plenty of octaves, close to 250 attacks: keep your wrist loose to last more than four minutes without tiring. Respect the moderate tempo, 72 here: it is what lets the syncopations be heard instead of being flattened.