Music

Question 1

Composer who completed the grand ballets Firebird and Petrushka for Sergei Diaghilev

Answer 1

Igor Stravinsky

Question 2

Composer who produced the neoclassical work Symphony of Psalms

Answer 2

Igor Stravinsky

Question 3

Composer who moved to Hollywood, where he produced his only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress

Answer 3

Igor Stravinsky

Question 4

Composer who adopted the serialist, twelve-tone style of Anton Webern to produce the abstract ballet Agon

Answer 4

Igor Stravinsky

Question 5

Austrian composer who pioneered dodecaphony, the twelve-tone system, which treated all parts of the chromatic scale equally

Answer 5

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 6

Composer influenced by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, evident in his Transfigured Night for Strings

Answer 6

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 7

German musical term meaning “halfway between singing and speaking”

Answer 7

Sprechstimme

Question 8

Composer who broke from romanticism and developed expressionist pieces free from key or tone, such as Pierrot lunaire

Answer 8

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 9

Composer whose students include Alban Berg and Anton Webern

Answer 9

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 10

Composer who fled Nazi Germany, moving from Berlin to Los Angeles, where he completed A Survivor from Warsaw

Answer 10

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 11

Composer whose first two acts of his unfinished opera Moses und Aron are still performed today

Answer 11

Arnold Schoenberg

Question 12

Composer who studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Answer 12

Igor Stravinsky

Question 13

Composer who revived the opera in the U.K. with Peter Grimes

Answer 13

Benjamin Britten

Question 14

Britten opera about a fisherman who kills two of his apprentices

Answer 14

Peter Grimes

Question 15

Composer who wrote Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a tribute to his composition teacher

Answer 15

Benjamin Britten

Question 16

Composer who wrote incidental music for works by his friend W.H. Auden

Answer 16

Benjamin Britten

Question 17

Classical music festival founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

Answer 17

Aldeburgh Festival of Music

Question 18

Composer who founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music with his companion Peter Pears

Answer 18

Benjamin Britten

Question 19

Composer of the operas Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice

Answer 19

Benjamin Britten

Question 20

Composer who wrote the American West theme El Salón Mexico

Answer 20

Aaron Copland

Question 21

Composer of War Requiem, based on the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen, who was killed during World War I

Answer 21

Benjamin Britten

Question 22

Composer who was the first American student of the pedagogue Nadia Boulanger

Answer 22

Aaron Copland

Question 23

Composer who finished his Organ Symphony and Music for the Theatre in Paris in the 1920s

Answer 23

Aaron Copland

Question 24

Composer who wrote the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring

Answer 24

Aaron Copland

Question 25

Copland ballet containing the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”

Answer 25

Appalachian Spring

Question 26

Composer whose Third Symphony contains his Fanfare for the Common Man

Answer 26

Aaron Copland

Question 27

Composer whose Lincoln Portrait featured spoken portions of Abraham Lincoln’s writings

Answer 27

Aaron Copland

Question 28

Composer of several educational books, beginning with 1939’s What to Listen for in Music

Answer 28

Aaron Copland

Question 29

Composer of seven symphonies, of which the First (“Classical”) is the most notable

Answer 29

Sergei Prokofiev

Question 30

Composer who premiered the opera The Love for Three Oranges while in Chicago, based on Italian commedia dell’arte

Answer 30

Sergei Prokofiev

Question 31

Composer who wrote works for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, including The Prodigal Son

Answer 31

Sergei Prokofiev

Question 32

Composer who wrote the score for the film Alexander Nevsky upon returning to the U.S.S.R

Answer 32

Sergei Prokofiev

Question 33

Composer denounced by Stalin as “decadent” and forced to write obsequious tributes to him. He would go on to die just hours after Stalin on March 5, 1953

Answer 33

Sergei Prokofiev

Question 34

Composer whose works were emblematic of both the Soviet regime and his attempts to survive under its oppression. He was severely criticized by Stalin in Pravda in 1936

Answer 34

Dmitri Shostakovich

Question 35

Composer who wrote the operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Answer 35

Dmitri Shostakovich

Question 36

Composer who wrote the conciliatory pieces Fifth Symphony, Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), and Twelfth Symphony

Answer 36

Dmitri Shostakovich

Question 37

Composer who made enemies with his Thirteenth Symphony (“Babi Yar”), based on the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem

Answer 37

Dmitri Shostakovich

Question 38

Soviet poet who wrote Babi Yar, condemning anti-Semitism, upon which Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was based

Answer 38

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Question 39

Composer whose Basque mother gave him an affinity for Spanish themes, such as Rapsodie espagnole

Answer 39

Maurice Ravel

Question 40

Composer of Pavane for a Dead Princess while a student of Gabriel Fauré

Answer 40

Maurice Ravel

Question 41

Composer overlooked by the French Conservatory for the Prix de Rome four times

Answer 41

Maurice Ravel

Question 42

Composer of the ballet Daphnis et Chloé for Sergei Diaghilev, as well as Mother Goose and La Valse

Answer 42

Maurice Ravel

Question 43

Composer who reorchestrated Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Answer 43

Maurice Ravel

Question 44

Composer whose health declined after a 1932 taxi accident. Unsuccessful brain surgery ended his life

Answer 44

Maurice Ravel

Question 45

Composer of the Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra

Answer 45

George Gershwin

Question 46

Author upon whose story Porgy and Bess the Gershwin opera was based

Answer 46

DuBose Heyward

Question 47

Gershwin’s first major hit, sung by Al Jolson in 1919

Answer 47

Swanee

Question 48

Composer of the first musical to win the Pullitzer Prize for Drama, Of Thee I Sing

Answer 48

George Gershwin

Question 49

Composer who died of a brain tumour at age 38

Answer 49

George Gershwin

Question 50

American avant-garde student of Arnold Schoenberg

Answer 50

John Cage

Question 51

Dada composer who propagated aleatory, or “chance” music

Answer 51

John Cage

Question 52

Composer of Imaginary Landscape No. 4, using twelve radios tuned to different stations, the composition depending on what was playing at the time

Answer 52

John Cage

Question 53

Composer of 4’33”, which required a pianist to sit at the piano for that length of time and close it; audience noise and silence created the music

Answer 53

John Cage

Question 54

Inventor of the prepared piano, in which screws, wood, and rubber bands were attached to piano strings to create percussion sounds

Answer 54

John Cage

Question 55

Composer who revived the Tudor style and folk traditions in English music

Answer 55

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Question 56

Composer of Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Hugh the Drover, and the Pilgrim’s Progress

Answer 56

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Question 57

Composer of nine symphonies, notably his First Symphony (“Sea”), Second Symphony (“London”), Third Symphony (“Pastoral”), and Seventh Symphony (“Sinfonia Antarctica”)

Answer 57

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Question 58

Ralph Vaughan Williams work based on a George Meredith poem

Answer 58

The Lark Ascending

Question 59

Ralph Vaughan Williams opera featuring the Fantasia on Greensleeves

Answer 59

Sir John in Love

Question 60

Composer of the Shakespearean opera Sir John in Love, featuring the Fantasia on Greensleeves

Answer 60

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Question 61

Virtuouso pianist and conductor who twice turned down conductorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Answer 61

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 62

Composer who cheaply sold his early pieces to a publisher, such as C-Sharp Minor Prelude

Answer 62

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 63

Composer treated by hypnosis in 1901 to cure his multi-year depression

Answer 63

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 64

Composer of Second Piano Concerto and the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead

Answer 64

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 65

Composer who moved to the U.S. in 1917 following the Bolshevik Revolution

Answer 65

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 66

Composer who completed Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

Answer 66

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Question 67

Composer inspired by peasant tunes of the Hungarian countryside with Zoltan Kodály

Answer 67

Béla Bartók

Question 68

Composer of the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Answer 68

Béla Bartók

Question 69

Composer of the ballets The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin

Answer 69

Béla Bartók

Question 70

Virtuouso pianist and innovative composer who fled Nazi-allied Hungary for the U.S. in 1940

Answer 70

Béla Bartók

Question 71

Composer of many instrumental pieces, notably six string quartets, the educational piece Mikrokosmos, and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

Answer 71

Béla Bartók

Question 72

Composer who studied music at Yale but found insurance sales more lucrative

Answer 72

Charles Ives

Question 73

Composer whose insurance firm with Myrick was the largest in New York during the 1910s

Answer 73

Charles Ives

Question 74

State in which composer Charles Ives was born

Answer 74

Connecticut

Question 75

Composer of the Second Piano Sonata (“Concord”) and Three Places in New England

Answer 75

Charles Ives

Question 76

Charles Ives work with movements named after Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau

Answer 76

Second Piano Sonata (“Concord”)

Question 77

Composer whose father George was a local Connecticut businessman and bandleader

Answer 77

Charles Ives

Question 78

Composer whose Third Symphony won a Pullitzer Prize in 1947

Answer 78

Charles Ives

Question 79

Composer whose General William Booth Enters into Heaven was based on a Vachel Lindsay poem

Answer 79

Charles Ives