You already know this tune, even if you've never known its name. It's the Marche funèbre—the third movement of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor—and it is almost certainly the most recognized funeral music ever written.

Chopin wrote the march in 1837 and only later built the rest of the sonata around it. The outer sections are the famous part: that slow, inevitable tread in the bass that everyone can hum. But the middle of the piece opens into a passage of startling tenderness—quiet, consoling, almost a lullaby—before the march returns and closes the door. Grief, and then the memory of what was lost, and then grief again.

It was played at Chopin's own funeral at the Madeleine in Paris in 1849, in an orchestration made for the occasion.

So of course I turned it into a rag. If the man who wrote it minds, he's had a hundred and seventy-odd years to say so.