Description
Not a rag but, as its subtitle has it, "A Mexican Serenade," built on the habanera rhythm. Written in 1909: the Latin idioms arriving through the Caribbean had reached the St. Louis and New Orleans of Joplin's lifetime, and this is the most direct trace of them in his work. The 1973 film The Sting made it widely known.
Instead of leaping between bass and chord, the left hand quietly keeps a dotted habanera pattern in duple time. The F major melody above it is long-breathed and moves in a wholly different sense of time from ragtime's skip. Of everything Joplin wrote, this is the piece closest to song.
Because the left-hand pattern is simple, its evenness is the quality of a performance at this intermediate level: do not let the dotted rhythm soften. The right hand must sing without breaking the line and must not sink into the chords. Played as a rag, the piece loses the thing that makes it itself.
Ragtime pieces centered on Scott Joplin's syncopated rhythms — a lively American genre that helped pave the way for jazz.
Browse all songs in Ragtime →Sheet Music
Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
About the Composer
Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
Scott Joplin was an African American composer born in Texas, known as the "King of Ragtime." Blending syncopated, buoyant rhythms with sophisticated harmony, he brought the genre to national prominence with the enormous success of "Maple Leaf Rag." This site includes 18 of his works, such as "The Entertainer" and "Elite Syncopations."
View all works by Joplin →