Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Troubadors travelled the countryside singing and making music, often ballads. In church, one could hear men and boys singing plainchant, which was usually monophonic but later heterophonic. St. Gregory's church modes, authentic and plagal, prevailed [c.500-1400]
2. Similar to the preceding era but with more innovations, including full triads but no key signatures yet. The Burgundian, Franco-Flemish, and Venetian schools flourished. Polyphony in sacred music develops, and full triads are heard. Composers: Giovanni da Palestrina, Guilliaume Dufay [c.1400-1600]
3. This is the period of concertos; of organs, violins, and harpsichords; of polyphony and tonality (with key signatures); and the end of the church modes. Opera and the orchestra were invented. One of the three main periods of the Common Practice Era. Composers: Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, Handel, Scarlatti [c.1600-1750]
4. With a name that suggests dashing and courtly merriment or pleasure, this is a sub-period that overlaps two main periods of the Common Practice Era. Homophony returns but with elaborate ornamentation, but also short phrasing and the Alberti baseline. Composers: C.P.E. Bach, Domenico Alberti, Daniel Gottlob Türk [c.1720s-1770s]
5. Somehow, this name got extended to an entire genre of music before and after its time, but to a musicologist it's the 2nd period in the Common Practice Era. It replaces ornate polyphony with a melody over accompaniment and embraces clarity, economy, balance, and strict form. The sonata-allegro form arises. Composers: Mozart, Haydn, Clementi, Salieri, Schubert [c. 1750-1820]
6. In this third and last period of the Common Practice Era, nationalism and program music arise, and order and forms are deferred to content and passions, including the sublime, supernatural, and exotic. Tonality is still preserved, but there is more use of modulation, dissonance, and chromaticism. Composers: Chopin, Brahms, Mahler, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky [c.1820-1910]
7. Overlaps the Common Practice Era and the Modern Era (20th and 21st centuries). The music resembles the art it is named after: dreamy like Monet. Old forms are rejected; scales are modal or whole-tone; harmonies may be dissonant. Composers: Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Mary Howe, Lili Boulanger. [c.1890s-1930s]
8. The twelve-tone scale, the rejection of tonality, the avoidance of conventional beauty, dissonance, distortion of reality, and German angst could all describe this movement of the Modern Era in music. Composers: Schoenberg, Webern, Berg [c. 1910s-1930s]
9. In the early 20th century one finds composers turning to both the foundations of Western civilizations and to non-Western cultures, with others looking more narrowly to folk idioms and history. A paradoxical time that lacks a cohesive name! Composers: Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bartók, Barber, Copland [c.1900s-1950s]
10. A catch-all if somewhat unsatisfactory, nondescript, and transitory name for a variety of post-tonal music since World War II. Experimentation, electronics, serialism, aleatory, polystylism, and minimalism -- you name it, it's there. Composers: John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Philip Glass [c.1945-2020s]
Source: Author
gracious1
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