help! first time composing "ragtime" for piano

This is my first post EVER of a song I composed, so I figure I should give a little background.

I usually try and compose music of the style of Bach, but recently, Scott Joplin has interested me, and I decided to try to compose for piano a little syncopated piece...

Any suggestion, comments, critiques would be great to help me get past this writer's block I'm having. I always get to a certain point in a piece and have trouble developing it further, any thoughts on how it "should" progress would be awesome.

MP3 -> syncopation.mp3 - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage

thanks in advance!

- Victor

syncopation.pdf

Cool piece! It definitely feels ragtime, and the syncopations sound great. I think already there are a lot of materials presented in the music, and it might be helpful to go back through the piece and organize those materials. You could begin by identifying distinct, easily recognizable motifs/phrases/sentences and developing/expanding them and giving them strong character and cadences. Once you have a few of these phrases/sentences, you could organize them into larger structures (A-B-A-C-A, A-B-C-A, etc). Perhaps this kind of construction can help inform new ideas that develop into additional materials for the piece. Alternately, finishing the piece in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way then going back through it to organize might be effective also, especially since you might be already well into the piece. I hope this is helpful! The challenge of developing a piece of music for an extended length of time is something I also often struggle with, so I can relate to your situation. I think I haven't yet written something longer than 5 minutes (and getting even to the 3-minute mark is a great challenge for me).

nice!

The only problem I hear and see(if it's even a problem) is while following your melody line, the downbeat shifts. If this is absolutely intended, but there's a couple place where your melody might end on an extra beat (eg. taking 5 beats to develop instead of four) which makes the audience hear the expected down beat, melodically, on 2, even though your bass clef is consistent throughout. One example of this is mm. 8. The repeating theme you have moves a beat forward everytime you repeat it because your bass line run is 5 beats. So the 1st time, it's on 1, the second time (mm9) it's on 2, the third time (mm10) it's on 3. From there, the 'downbeat' stays on beat 3 the until mm.18 where it is finally back on 1. Again, if this is completely intentional, then by all means ignore me, but as a listener, I was just off balance the whole time it was skewed. There's a couple other places it does that, but I think this first one was the one that threw me off the most. Otherwise, it's a good, fun listen, and very well done for your first time attempting a ragtime sort of piece. Good job. Do you have a title yet?