Classical Music & Composers Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the Italian term, literally meaning in the manner of the chapel, for choral or group singing performed with no instrumental accompaniment of any kind, the voices supplying all the harmony and any rhythmic drive themselves?

Question 2

Which French composer, often linked against his wishes to Impressionist painting, wrote a dreamy piano piece named after moonlight, an orchestral prelude inspired by a poem about a faun, a three-part seascape, and a single, understated opera about doomed lovers named Pelleas and Melisande?

Question 3

Which orchestral percussion instrument, a set of large bowl-shaped drums played with mallets, is tuned to definite pitches, usually the key note and the note a fourth or fifth below, and on modern instruments can be retuned mid-piece with a foot pedal?

Question 4

Which instrument, often called the king of instruments, produces sound by sending wind through ranks of tuned pipes, is played from one or more keyboards plus a pedalboard for the feet, and uses stops to bring different sets of pipes into play?

Question 5

What is the name for a work that sets a solo instrument, or a small group of them, against a full orchestra, typically in three movements, and usually including a passage near the end of the first movement where the orchestra falls silent and the soloist plays alone?

Question 6

What is the name for the interval spanning three whole tones, such as the notes C and F sharp, an unstable, restless sound that medieval theorists are said to have shunned as the devil in music?

Question 7

Which French composer wrote three hushed, slow piano pieces called Gymnopedies, gave his works whimsical titles and mock instructions to the player, and proposed background music he called furniture music, decades before the idea of ambient music?

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About Classical Music & Composers

Classical music is the written art-music tradition of the West, running from medieval chant to the present day, and this quiz covers its composers, works, forms and vocabulary in eighty questions. Each describes a composer, a period, a genre, a technique, a famous piece or an instrument's role, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains what it is along with a record, a story or a dispute attached to it.

The first pack is the bedrock: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven; Vivaldi, Handel and Haydn; Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky; the three great style periods, Baroque, Classical and Romantic; and the central forms and roles, the symphony, the concerto, the opera, the string quartet, the fugue and the conductor.

The second pack widens the field. More composers, Schubert, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Debussy, Dvorak, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Verdi, Puccini, Grieg, Sibelius, Bartok, Copland, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Ravel and Berlioz. More forms and terms, sonata form, the oratorio, the requiem, chamber music, the cadenza, the opus number, the Lied, the symphonic poem, the etude, the nocturne, counterpoint and programme music. The roles of the pipe organ, the harpsichord, the timpani and the cello. And the Ballets Russes that tied music to the wider modern arts.

The third pack is history, oddity and legend: Satie and Prokofiev; the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring; Clara Schumann and the teacher Nadia Boulanger; the Salieri poisoning myth and the film Amadeus; the cataloguing systems named for Kochel; Paganini and the devil's-interval tritone; John Cage's silent 4'33"; twelve-tone technique; the metronome and standard concert pitch; Gregorian chant; the castrato voice; the debunked Mozart effect; the Curse of the Ninth; the London Proms; and the difference between absolute and relative pitch.

The wrong answers are always names of the same kind, a composer beside composers, a form beside forms, so the quiz tests recognition rather than recall, and a shaky guess is easily punished. Nothing assumes you read music: every technical term is explained in plain language where it appears. Images are used only where a neutral photograph, a hall, a score page, a keyboard, a pair of pointe shoes, an orchestra pit, gives nothing away, since a portrait or a titled manuscript would. A few myths are corrected: Salieri almost certainly did not poison Mozart; the label 'Impressionist' was rejected by Debussy himself; the 'Curse of the Ninth' is a cherry-picked coincidence; and the Mozart effect never made anyone cleverer for longer than about a quarter of an hour.