The Ragtime Dance
Romantic Piano solo 4 min
In brief

The piece projects a lively, dance-like energy with alternating bouncy accents and more speech-like melodic lines, requiring crisp articulation to convey its popular-rhythm character. You will specifically face issues with Tempo rubato (3.1/5) — applying very slight tempo flexibility without blurring the underlying pulse — and Syncopes (2.5/5) — the gesture demands precise coordination between the left hand maintaining the accompaniment and the right hand placing offbeat accents. It belongs to Joplin’s ragtime repertoire, combining salon-style writing with popular dance influences from the turn of the 20th century.

Listen to this work

No verified recording for this work yet. We add more every week.

Sheet music

Public-domain sheet music on IMSLP ↗

Is this the right work?
MusicCoach difficulty
50/100
Intermediate
Likely range : 38–62/100
Confidence : 35% · to confirm
BeginnerIntermediateAdvancedVirtuoso
Exam grade
About grade 5 to 6

Estimated from our difficulty score, not taken from an exam syllabus. Checked against 333 works on the ABRSM syllabus: the exact grade is right 7 times out of 10, and within one grade 99 times out of 100.

Difficulty estimate by MusicCoach on a scale of 1 to 100.

Where this work sits
050100

Most works cluster between 45 and 65: a small score gap often marks a real step. The highlighted bar shows this work among those for the same instrument.

The MusicCoach difficulty measures a work's overall demands (technique, reading, stamina) on a shared 0-100 scale, consolidated from editorial and pedagogical reference points (Henle, exam syllabuses, curation) and our own analyses. It measures neither musical value nor the practice time YOU will need: two musicians of the same level can experience the same work very differently depending on their strengths (hands used to octaves, quick sight-reading…). The confidence reflects how many reference points sit behind the score and how well they agree — a lightly documented score is flagged “to validate”. For a truly personal bearing, the diagnostic and your space compare each work to YOUR estimated level, which the score alone cannot do.

Does this rating look right to you?

This rating is computed automatically from heterogeneous sources. It gets things wrong, sometimes badly. If you know this work, your answer is worth more than our computation: it tells us which ratings to review.

Add a note (optional)

Your note is not published on the site: it is read in review.

Relative difficulty
95%
Among Scott Joplin
35%
Era Romantic
Genre
Estimated skills
Pedaling
Sustain pedal
1
Style
Romantic style
1
Rhythm
Tempo rubato
1
Technique
Hand independence
1
Rhythm
Dotted rhythms
1
Rhythm
Syncopation
1
What to play next?

Each suggestion combines difficulty gap, risk, confidence and skill overlap. The first two cards in each column are the most useful pedagogically.

See the whole progression