Ragtime is a musical form that synthesizes folk melodies and musical techniques into a brief quadrille-like structure, designed to be played – exactly as written – on the piano. A strong analogy exists between European composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Grieg, and Anton Dvorak who combined folk tunes and their own original materials in larger compositions and the pioneer ragtime composers in the United States. Composers like Scott Joplin and James Scott were in a sense collectors or musicologists, collecting dance and folk music in Black communities and consciously shaping it into brief suites or anthologies called piano rags.