Music Theory & Terminology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the sounding together of two or more conflicting rhythms or metres, such as a pattern of three even notes played at the same time as a pattern of two, neither giving way to the other?

Question 2

What is the name for the curling symbol, also called the G clef, placed at the start of a staff so that its inner curl wraps around the second line from the bottom, marking that line as the G above middle C?

Question 3

What is the name for the old belief, taken seriously in the Baroque and Classical eras, that each major and minor key carries its own particular mood or colour, so that D major is brilliant and triumphant while E flat is noble and C minor is tragic?

Question 4

What is the name for two different written notes that name the very same pitch and sound identical on a piano, such as F sharp and G flat, or B sharp and C?

Question 5

What is the name for the compositional device of restating a melody or a subject in note values that are systematically longer, most often doubled, so that the tune proceeds at half speed against the surrounding music?

Question 6

What is the name for the group of sharp or flat symbols written just after the clef at the start of every line, showing which notes are to be raised or lowered throughout the piece and so telling the player what key the music is in?

Question 7

What is the name for a gradual slowing of the tempo, often abbreviated rit. and used to round off a phrase or a whole piece, after which the direction a tempo restores the original speed?

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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.