Q.1
is, itself, surely one of the monumental classics of 19th-century Romantic 'programme music', consisting of a suite of piano pieces composed in response to an art show. The artist-architect Viktor Hartmann had died suddenly, aged just 39, and this retrospective exhibition was held in St Petersburg inThe (musical) work is even better known through a sensitively orchestrated version by a later composer; how is it usually credited on programmes, CD liners ?
  • Borodin, orch. Dvorak
  • Balakirev, orch. Tchaikovsky
  • Chopin, orch. Douglas
  • Mussorgsky, orch. Ravel
Q.2
Music as a medium of public entertainment and education arose particularly in the 19th century; and once it also became possible to entertain and educate people with moving pictures ( thanks to the invention of cinematography) around the end of that century, the race was on to yoke music and dialogue to these a soundtrack for a 'multi-sensory' experience, as achieved in the first 'talkie' inUntil and beyond that time, there were also theatre and cinema organs which allowed 'orchestral-style' playing of atmospheric music, and were often also equipped with some sound effects on the 'toy counter' of the console: horse-hoofs, bells, sirens, wind and rain noises, bird-whistles and the like. By the technological standards of the day these were clever, remarkable, practical and fun.The author Aldous Huxley in his (1931) goes at least one step better: his 'cinema trip', in the then-near future, is developed into which of these experiences?
  • The film is in 3D and the soundtrack plays through individual binaural stereo headphones
  • The music is played through speakers inside the auditorium seats, to provide immediacy to it and anticipating 'sensurround'
  • The show is called 'the Feelies', with audience members gripping a brass knob on the armrest that allows sensations to be sent direct to their nerves by electric current; and in the interval, an organ-like console ascends onto the stage, but it plays a 'symphony of smells and scents' rather than music for the ears
  • The music is all-electronic and comes from loudspeakers which move around the auditorium, or else the control system is sophisticated enough to make that seem to be what is happening
Q.3
Music and movement have obviously gone hand-in-hand (as it were), in ritual and recreational contexts, practically since the dawn of civilisation. Which of these would you regard as the 'oddest one out'?
  • The march
  • The sea-shanty
  • The minuet
  • The barcarolle
Q.4
If poetry is one step above ordinary prose and dialogue, the setting of such poetry to music is presumably a further step upwards. Who is regarded as the pioneer of the Art Song ~ a form in which music festivals sometimes adjudicate the 'singer and pianist as a team', in their joint interpretation and projection of the text or story in its musicalised version?
  • Franz Schubert
  • Hugo Wolf
  • Franz Joseph Haydn
  • Claude Debussy
Q.5
What with (massive) electric amplification and computers, many of us are well aware of outdoor sound-and-light ( ) and laser shows. But the history of multi-sensory spectacle goes back at least as far as Handel's ... in which year?
  • 1737
  • 1741
  • 1746
  • 1749
Q.6
Dance, ballet and choreography can of course be performed to splendid effect with a cast of humans and a band of musicians; but ever since the mechanical wherewithal has existed, there has been an understandable temptation to put on performances, to music, with various other forms of 'things moving in formation'. Which of these is the odd one out?
  • The Musical Ride of the Household Cavalry
  • The Red Arrows
  • The Hamburg Harbour tugboat ballet
  • Leroy Anderson's 'Sandpaper Ballet'
Q.7
Music can be, even shamelessly, enlisted to manipulate (rather than 'merely' articulate) the public mood on special occasions of celebration, mourning or for any other purpose. 'Oom-pah' and 'rah-rah' bands spring readily to mind, or the great funeral marches and elegies on Remembrance Day. Whose music is associated both with Remembrance Day and also with the Last Night of the Proms, thus representing both our national 'downs' as well as our 'ups', so to put it?
  • Charles Hubert Hastings Parry
  • Edward Elgar
  • Charles Villiers Stanford
  • Henry Walford Davies
Q.8
Of course, many writers and other 'flat-static-medium' artists and sculptors have tried their best to evoke the nature and spirit of music. Most of us know such lapidary quotations as Shakespeare's 'If music be the food of love, play on' and the famous ode 'To Music' ( ), duly set by Schubert to the short poem by his near-namesake Franz von Schober. But who wrote ~ oh, so truly ~ 'Music has charms to soothe the savage breast'?
  • Shakespeare
  • Marlowe
  • Johnson
  • Congreve
Q.9
For many centuries it was fondly believed that the great rhythms of the heavenly bodies, moving slowly across our night skies, were a physical form of music with its own harmony and choreography ~ which we humans, with our limited senses and intellect, could not fully appreciate, but which pointed us towards the elegance, pleasure and 'truth' of our own little forms of earthly music. It took a particularly bold composer to try and illustrate in the form of an orchestral dance by that title: who was he?
  • John Philip Sousa
  • Johann Strauss
  • Hector Berlioz
  • Richard Wagner
Q.10
Shakespeare (him again!) obviously had a keen ear for language and communication, and a ready sense for the 'rhythm' of people interacting privately and on the stage. Music is a recurrent and fruitful metaphorical field for him, not least in his 'problem play' , during which, as the Trojan War looms, one character considers the threat to the 'Elizabethan World Order' in just such musical terms: [= rank, order and hierarchy] (?)
  • ... hark, what discord follows!
  • ... harmony is banished
  • ... all is lost forever
  • ... civ'lisation falters
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