Music in the World (Part One) Quiz

Question: Which English composer of the Baroque period wrote more than 100 songs, the miniature opera Dido and Aeneas, and incidental music to a version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, called The Fairy Queen?

Answer: Henry Purcell was the English composer of the Baroque period who is most remembered for his more than 100 songs, the miniature opera Dido and Aeneas, and his incidental music to a version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, called The Fairy Queen. He was the most important English composer of his time.

Question: Which great German composer had a serious hearing affliction?

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and a predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. He struggled against hearing loss, and some of his most important works were composed during the last 10 years of his life when he was quite unable to hear.

Question: Which singer, recording a song by bluesman Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup and a waltz by Bill Monroe, developed the sound that came to be known as “rockabilly”?

Answer: In July 1954, in his first session for Sam Phillips’s Sun label of Memphis, Elvis Presley recorded two songs that would lay the foundation for rockabilly: “That’s All Right,” written by Mississippi bluesman Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup, and a hopped-up version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a mid-tempo waltz by Bill Monroe, the creator of bluegrass. Presley sang with African American inflections and more emotional intensity than country singers of the time.

Question: Which of these singers is not associated with gospel music?

Answer: Alberta Hunter was an American blues singer who achieved international fame in the 1930s for her vigorous and rhythmically infectious style; she was not associated with gospel music.

Question: What American folk singer was hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation?

Answer: Bob Dylan moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry. He was hailed by some as the Shakespeare of his generation.

Question: Who created a new method of music composition based on a row, or series, of 12 tones?

Answer: Arnold Schoenberg was the Austrian-American composer who created a new method of composition based on a row, or series, of 12 tones—a method called atonality.

Question: Who composed the Brandenburg Concertos?

Answer: Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach is now generally regarded in the West as one of the greatest composers of all time. He is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos as well as The Well-Tempered Clavier, Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music.

Question: Which composer created polystylism?

Answer: Alfred Schnittke was the postmodernist experimental Russian composer who created “polystylism,” a musical form that brought together diverse musical epochs at what he called their “points of contiguity.”

Question: Which musical instrument is also called the whistle flute?

Answer: The fipple flute is also called whistle flute. Either name is used for any of several end-blown flutes having a plug (“block,” or “fipple”) inside the pipe below the mouth hole.

Question: Which composer invented the concept of estate planning?

Answer: Charles Ives was an American composer known for a number of innovations that anticipated most of the later musical developments of the 20th century. He became an insurance clerk and part-time organist in New York City. In 1907 he founded the highly successful insurance partnership of Ives & Myrick, which he headed from 1916 to 1930. He devised the insurance concept of estate planning and considered his years in business a valuable human experience that contributed to the substance of his music.

Question: Who invented the clarinet?

Answer: Johann Christoph Denner was a German maker of musical instruments and the inventor of the clarinet. He invented it sometime between 1690 and 1700.

Question: Which jazz singer had a vocal range of barely more than an octave?

Answer: Billie Holiday’s jazz singing style was crafted out of an original amalgam of the vocal stylings of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith as well as her own vocal-technical limitations—her range was barely more than an octave.

Question: Who wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress (1951)?

Answer: W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman together rehabilitated the art of the opera libretto. Their best-known collaborations are The Rake’s Progress (1951), for Igor Stravinsky; Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966), for Hans Werner Henze; and Love’s Labour’s Lost for Nicolas Nabokov.

Question: Which composer of several American popular standards also found success as a character actor, notably in the movie To Have and Have Not (1944)?

Answer: During a stay in New York, Hoagy Carmichael became friends with the young lyricist Johnny Mercer. The two collaborated on several songs throughout the years, with “Lazy Bones” being their first hit in 1933. Other hits composed during Carmichael’s years in New York included “Lazy River,” “Rockin’ Chair,” and “Georgia” (also known as “Georgia on My Mind”). Carmichael moved to Hollywood in 1936. There he composed songs for films and found additional success as a character actor, often playing the role of a philosophical and world-weary piano player, as in To Have and Have Not (1944).