Great Crush Collision March, by Joplin
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
Get the practice plan for Great Crush Collision March
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (60 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in F major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: F, B♭maj7, B♭m7♭5 and Amaj7. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 60 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (90 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 4 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Written to commemorate a publicity stunt: in 1896 a Texas railway deliberately crashed two locomotives head-on in front of forty thousand spectators. The score has instructions in it for imitating the crash.
How to play it
Follow the printed directions for the collision literally. The piece is a joke and only works if you commit to it.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Joplin sheet music
Who Joplin was
American composer and pianist, the acknowledged king of ragtime, who treated the syncopated, foot-tapping dance music of Black communities in the American South and Midwest as a serious art form worth writing down and refining, not merely performing. The Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, sold well enough to give him something close to financial independence, almost unheard of for a Black composer at the time. He spent his final years obsessed with an opera, Treemonisha, that he could never get fully staged in his lifetime, and died in poverty in 1917, his reputation nearly forgotten until a ragtime revival in the 1970s brought his music back, and with it, in 1976, a posthumous Pulitzer Priz…
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including F major.