Maple Leaf Rag - Easy Piano
by Scott Joplin
Piano Method - Digital Sheet Music

Piano Solo - Level 2 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.881395

Composed by Scott Joplin. Arranged by Joshua Devine. Instructional,Ragtime,Standards. Score. 16 pages. Devine Music Studio #35337. Published by Devine Music Studio (A0.881395).

This easy piano arrangement of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag will become a student favorite. The carefully composed piano reduction makes the Maple Leaf Rag accessible to new students, while retaining all the energy of the original piece. Easy to play and read, this Paint with Piano arrangement features full color notation to teach theory and hand drawn notation symbols to aid the visual memory. This piece will even fit a young hand perfectly, with simple and predictable chord patterns and natural hand movement. It can be challenging to play the "ragged" rhythms (also called syncopation) in the Maple Leaf Rag. This arrangement also includes technique exercises which take out the "ragged" rhythms and replace them with straight rhythms, speeding up the learning process. It is highly recommended that you begin your practice with the technique exercises. They will be easier to learn and read in the beginning. After mastering the technique exercises, students can compare them to the original song and note how the "ragged rhythms" alter the way the music looks and sounds. The Maple Leaf Rag comes from the genre music called rag time which is known for its "ragged" rhythms. Rag time music began as a dance form in St Louis and New Orleans around 1900. Scott Joplin is the most well known composer of rag time music, and it was this piece, which was originally published in 1899 when Joplin was 32 years old, that helped to make him famous.