My wife and I spent nearly three months in Lviv, Ukraine, in the autumn of 2002. We had the great fortune of staying for most of that time near the centre of the old part of the city — mere blocks from the opera house — in a lovely apartment owned by a family friend of hers. There was, in that apartment, an old upright piano, not in particularly good repair nor adequate tune, but more than sufficient for the casual composition I was doing at the time.

One day, I awoke with an insistent urge to write a ragtime piano solo. (No doubt this was inspired by the “honky-tonk” sound I heard as I composed each day.) In a very short period of time — certainly less than a week — I had completed my first rag.

From the start, my working title for the piece was, naturally enough, “Першй Раґ”, which translates from the Ukrainian as “First Rag”. Of course, I knew I would need an English title eventually. I intended to wait patiently for the right one to come to me. However, as composition progressed, and the coda and its falling motive began to emerge, the sound-alike “Parachute Rag” sprang into my head. In one of my favourite bits of self-fulfilling prophecy, I employed that image to inform the composition of the coda into its final shape.