I created a LilyPond file for The Entertainer by Scott Joplin because someday I intend to edit an embellished version starting from the original. This is probably the most popular ragtime song of all time, and is in large part responsible for the ragtime revival of the 1970s. It was also the first ragtime song I played as a child.
I find the Frescobaldi tool is indispensable for making quick progress. It displays the source code and the typeset output side-by-side. One can click on notes in the source to see what it corresponds to in the typeset output, and vice-versa. With lots of experience with LilyPond, it took about 3 hours to create this file from scratch. If that sounds like a long time, imagine how long it took to typeset music in the 1800s and most of the 1900s.
Here is the PDF file rendered by LilyPond.
Here is the MIDI file generated by LilyPond.
And here is an on-line MIDI player for instant gratification.
Here is Tom Brier playing it in 2016 at the Santa Cruz Ragtime Festival. It’s hard enough to play as written, but he had this amazing ability to add embellishments on the spot, playing it differently every time. In this video he hadn’t even played it recently and couldn’t remember the intro — yet he could play the rest of it perfectly. Thanks to Ron O’Dell for recording and posting the video.
