Music Theory & Terminology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the ornament, printed as a small note, that falls on the beat and leans expressively on the following main note, delaying it and taking away part of its time, before resolving into it by a step?

Question 2

What is the name for the steady, regular pulse underlying a piece of music, the thing a listener taps a foot or claps along to, and whose speed is measured as the tempo?

Question 3

What is the name for the pair of numbers stacked like a fraction at the start of a piece, the upper telling how many beats fill each bar and the lower telling which kind of note counts as one beat?

Question 4

What is the name for the five-stroke rhythmic pattern, spread asymmetrically over two bars in a three-plus-two or two-plus-three grouping, that acts as the organising key to which every other part in Afro-Cuban music must align?

Question 5

What is the name for a metre in which each main beat divides naturally into three equal parts rather than two, as in the signatures six-eight, nine-eight and twelve-eight?

Question 6

What is the name for the device of taking a short melodic or harmonic pattern and then immediately repeating it once or twice more, each time starting a step higher or a step lower?

Question 7

What is the name for a note written with a small dot immediately after its head, which lengthens it by half its own value again, so that a half note with one lasts three beats rather than two?

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About Music Theory & Terminology

Music theory is the toolkit for reading, writing and talking about how music is put together, and this quiz covers its vocabulary in eighty questions. Each describes a piece of notation, a pitch idea, an interval, a chord, a rhythm term, a dynamic, an ornament or a formal device, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains it in plain language.

The first pack is the groundwork: the staff and the clefs, middle C, the key and time signatures, the bar, the sharps and flats; the semitone, the major and minor scales, the interval and the triad, the tonic and the beat; note values, rests and the dot; the singing syllables of solfege; and the Italian tempo words.

The second pack goes further. The chromatic, pentatonic and whole-tone scales and the church modes; relative keys and enharmonic notes; the perfect fifth, the third, consonance and interval inversion; the cadence, the dominant seventh, the circle of fifths, modulation, figured bass, the arpeggio and Roman numeral analysis; syncopation, the triplet, compound time, polyrhythm, the anacrusis and rubato; dynamics, crescendo, staccato, the fermata, ritardando, the tie and the trill; the appoggiatura; the textures of monophony and its relatives; the ostinato; binary form, theme and variations, the coda, da capo and call and response.

The third pack is the deeper end: atonality, the Pythagorean comma, the pedal point, Sprechstimme, the hemiola, augmentation, sight-reading, the lead sheet, the old idea of key characteristics, the Picardy third, the primary triads, the diminished seventh chord, word painting, through-composed form, the medieval teacher Guido of Arezzo, the suspension, the Neapolitan sixth, the Afro-Cuban clave, modal mixture and the false relation.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a scale beside scales, an interval beside intervals, an ornament beside ornaments, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Nothing here assumes you can already read music: every term is defined in plain words where it appears, and the quiz doubles as a short course in the language.

Images are used only where they genuinely cannot give the answer away. Because a picture of a clef or a specific symbol would simply be the answer, the only photos used are a plain page of standard notation or a piano keyboard, and each appears only on a question whose four options are all the same sort of term, so that the picture fits every one of them equally and predicts none. A few points of common confusion are cleared up along the way, such as the difference between a tie and a slur, between an appoggiatura and an acciaccatura, and between the relative and the parallel minor.