Adept, Not Inept Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and his nine symphonies demonstrate the transition between the Classical era of music and the Romantic era. Beethoven's first "hit" symphony was his third ("Eroica"). Allegedly, the piece was going to be dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, but when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France, Beethoven was enraged, and changed the work's dedication to honor an unnamed "great man." The second movement of "Eroica" is a funeral march which has been played at funerals honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, composer Felix Mendelssohn, and the athletes killed in the 1972 Munich massacre.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, now arguably his most-well-known, begins with that acclaimed "short-short-short-long" theme, which is repeated in several forms throughout the piece. That symphony also represents one of the first uses of the trombone in classical music. The Sixth Symphony, or "Pastoral", uncharacteristically has five movements and includes various representations of storms, a brook, and a social gathering. Finally, Beethoven's final symphony, number 9, is titled "Choral". Like so many others, Beethoven succumbed to the so-called "Curse of the Ninth" and died after writing it. Choral symphonies, with a choir included in the ensemble, saw their genesis under this work, which set Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" to music.

Answer: John Cage

John Cage (1912-1992) was a pioneer of the post-World War avant-garde school of music, a group who deliberately tried to be so innovative that their works sounded inept. Cage was a giant in twentieth-century music, pushing the limits of the music world in the same way that Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp pushed the limits of the art world. "Sonatas and Interludes" is a Cage collection of twenty works for prepared piano, influenced from ancient Indian and Chinese traditions, which entails placing nuts, bolts, screws, pieces of rubber, and even an eraser inside the piano itself.

Another fundamental aspect of Cage's work was called "aleatoric" music, which essentially means music by chance. Cage used this principle in his work to create a dynamic listening sensation: for example, he would choose random numbers, and use them to assign pitches in his work. Cage even resorted to the Chinese "I Ching", a hexagram-based divination system, and asked it questions, to compose.

In addition to these modernist adaptations, Cage is well-known for his quirky semi-musical arrangements. Of these, undoubtedly the most well-known is "4'33" ", a work in which the performer sits on stage for the allotted amount of time, while the audience listens to the sounds of their own silence. Another piece, "As Slow as Possible", is a piece which was begun in 2001 and is scheduled to finish in 2640 in a church in Halberstadt, Germany.

Answer: Carnival of the Animals

The French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) is probably best-known today for two pieces of music depicting extraordinary themes. His "Danse Macabre" is meant to describe Death and his minions cavorting around on Halloween. A xylophone plays a theme meant to depict rattling bones, while the violin's E string is intentionally tuned down from to an E-flat (this is called scordatura) to create dissonance. The piece's atmosphere is remarkably eerie.

Saint-Saens might be better known, though, for "Carnival of the Animals", a fourteen-movement suite meant to depict various animals (or people, as the case may be). Several of the movements are ironic. In "Tortoises", the string section plays a hilariously slow version of the can-can from Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld". In "Characters with Long Ears", two violins alternate between high pitches and low pitches to imitate the braying of a donkey. Saint-Saens mocked his own "Danse Macabre" in the section "Fossils", which also uses a xylophone to represent skeletons walking around, while fragments of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Au clair de la lune" are played. Anna Pavlova first gained international acclaim for his dancing performance to a choreographed version of the penultimate piece in the suite, "The Swan". A beautiful cello solo depicting the bird gliding over the surface of the water highlights that section.

Answer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) will luckily be remembered far more for his operas, symphonies, and concertos than that 1787 work, properly rendered into English as "Some Musical Fun". Although it's unknown for sure why such a musical giant would stoop to atrocious composing, the piece certainly is "fun." The first movement is intentionally repetitive and tedious, while in the third movement, the horns are told to intentionally play discordant notes. In the finale, each instrument jumps to a different key, creating polytonality for one of the first times in classical music as the entire piece essentially implodes. I think it's safe to say that Mozart wasn't going for innovation in this piece, though, as it would be more than a century before polytonality became a fad for the classical music world.

The non-humorous compositions aside, Mozart was an innovator, and likely the most important composer of the Classical period. His operas, such as "The Marriage of Figaro" and "Don Giovanni", are still performed today. Compositional works like his Piano Concerto No. 24, or the string serenade "A Little Night Music" remain popular, as do his forty-one symphonies. And of course, Mozart is also acclaimed for his religious music, including an unfinished requiem which has been the subject of much intrigue in modern times.

Answer: The Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) moved to Paris from Russia in 1910, to premiere three of his most well-known ballets: "The Firebird", "Petrushka", and his most famous, "The Rite of Spring". It was a move which would send reverberations around the classical music world when, on May 29, 1913, the last of these premiered at a Paris theater on the Champs-Elysees. That night, "The Rite of Spring" was following a performance of "Les Sylphides", an arrangement of Chopin music. However, most of the headlines were focused on Stravinsky's wild composition.

Much of the audience was probably unaware that a bassoon could even play as high as it does the first bar of "The Rite of Spring". The bassoon solo is iconic also for its uncharacteristic asymmetrical rhythms before the entire orchestra enters. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, the ballet itself centers on a pagan tradition in which a girl dances herself to death as sacrifice. The girl danced faster and faster, the music sped up and became more primitive and dissonant, and the audience raged. There were massive riots at the premiere, necessitating the police to be called and calm down the theater. Allegedly, Camille Saint-Saens stormed out of the building, furious that anyone would try to make a bassoon play that high.

Stravinsky's other pieces have earned similar criticisms of sounding intentionally bad: both the openings of "Petrushka" and his "Symphony of Psalms" have become known as famously discordant chords.

Answer: Johann Strauss, Jr.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) was an Austrian mostly known as "The Waltz King" for the plethora of dances he wrote during his compositional career. Strauss' father, a respectable composer in his own right, insisted to his son to be a banker, rather than a composer. Luckily for nineteenth-century European audiences desirous of a few good dance tunes, Strauss II went into music too. However, a rift opened up between father and son in 1848, when a revolution in Austria left Strauss I allied with the old regime and Strauss II with the revolutionaries. The son was even arrested and denied a position composing for the Austrian royalty, even though his father had once earned the job.

Despite the whole father-son drama, though, Strauss gained popularity with his waltzes, which was the popular dance form of the era. His best-known work, "The Blue Danube", has remained popular for decades.

Answer: Scherzo

The word "scherzo" actually comes from the Italian for "joke," and scherzos had been popular in classical music since Beethoven, who often put one in the second or third movement of his symphonies. Charles Ives, in true modernist fashion, made his own joke by titling the second movement of his Piano Trio for violin, cello, and piano "TSIAJ", or "This scherzo is a joke". Ives heavily borrowed from American folk tunes as well as Yale college songs, and then altered them nearly beyond recognition, in the work which was written just after Ives had begun to develop his signature techniques.

What were those, exactly? Charles Ives (1874-1954) is known as one of the first modernist composers, incorporating American folk traditions and culture into European musical developments, and creating a style distinctly his own. He's also known as one of the original developers of polytonality. His Symphony No. 2 mixes themes from Beethoven's Fifth, Brahms' First, and a variety of American patriotic songs, reshaping them and creating a unique product. Ives' well-known works include "Three Places in New England" and the often double-billed "Central Park in the Dark" and "The Unanswered Question". Ives died before completing his final work, called the Universe Symphony, which was intended to depict the past, present, and future in three movements.

Answer: Bolero

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was an important innovator in classical music, and although his work cannot easily be described as modernist, his methods and melodies were unique. He composed the ballet "Daphnis et Chloe" and made a well-known orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". Much of his output included works for the piano, such as "Gaspard de la nuit", the "Scarbo" section of which is often deemed the most challenging piece for piano in classical history. Today, though, Ravel is mostly known for a work he thought that orchestras would flat-out refuse to play, "Bolero".

Ravel once called "Bolero" "a piece for orchestra without music." Although originally composed for a ballet of the same name commissioned by Ida Rubenstein, "Bolero" is an around-fifteen-minute piece that repeats the same melody, over and over and over again. Arturo Toscanini, famed New York Philharmonic conductor, conducted the US premiere of the piece, and no one could believe the acclaim the piece received from enthused audiences. None of them seemed to recognize the tedium of a piece which has snare drums repeat a loud, triplet-laden rhythm as various instruments enter the crescendo. Ravel himself disliked "Bolero" immensely, so the fact that it's now his best-known work would probably immensely displease him!

Answer: Joseph Haydn

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), teacher of Beethoven and good friend to Mozart, worked as a court composer for much of his life, and rising from humble origins, became one of the most famous and accomplished composers of the Classical period. Haydn (as well as Mozart) was the forerunner of the "sonata" form. In a sonata form, a theme is originally stated, then developed and contrasted, and finally restated and resolved. The first movement of many symphonies and string quartets of the Classical period (and beyond) were written in sonata form. Haydn composed 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets, which is why he is often considered the father of those genres.

Perhaps better than any other composer, Haydn loved musical "jokes." In addition to "The Distracted" and "Surprise" symphonies, Haydn wrote several string quartets which incorporated progressively longer rests into the coda, making audiences wonder when the piece actually ended. In Symphony No. 45 ("Farewell"), the violins progressively stop playing, blow out the candle on their stands, and walk off stage, leaving, at the premiere, just Haydn and the concertmaster still playing.

Answer: Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) perhaps belongs in this quiz unfairly, because his work was intended to be different, not intentionally bad. As he himself once said, "My music is not lovely." Schoenberg is probably best-known for introducing the twelve-tone technique, a form in which all twelve notes in the chromatic scale are used equally throughout the piece, thus preventing the use of one specific key. The twelve notes are commonly arranged in what's known as a tone row, which is repeated and transformed throughout the twelve-toned piece. Many of Schoenberg's works are composed in this manner, including a tribute to Holocaust victims entitled "A Survivor from Warsaw", and the incomplete opera "Moses und Aron".

Schoenberg is known for other works, however. Another of his well-known pieces is "Pierrot Lunaire", essentially consisting of the songs of a clown from the Commedia dell'arte. In that piece, Schoenberg incorporated both atonality (the lack of a key) and Sprechstimme, a style halfway between singing and talking. Not all of Schoenberg's music is designed to sound somewhat discordant, though. For instance, his early string sextet "Transfigured Night" is tonal and still fairly popular today. Schoenberg also was known as a renowned music critic and an artist during his life. It is probably unsurprising that his paintings are modernist in the style of Wassily Kandinsky.