Q.1
The 'natural' (valveless) Baroque trumpet could only play comfortably in one key: which key?
  • B♭ major
  • C major
  • D major
  • G major
Q.2
Which composer, a giant of the 19th-century opera scene, required the design and building of special tubas to reach lower pitches than normal ones?
  • Giuseppe Verdi
  • Richard Wagner
  • Giacomo Puccini
  • Georges Bizet
Q.3
Mutes ~ for trumpets and other brass instruments ~ come in a variety of styles. Which of these is NOT a type of mute?
  • Straight
  • Cup
  • Bucket
  • Cone
Q.4
Which brass instrument is shown, in replica, on public mailboxes and related livery in various European and other countries?
  • The trumpet
  • The tuba
  • The posthorn
  • The saxophone
Q.5
The wonderful film (its title coming from a slang phrase meaning 'fed up' or 'disgruntled') is set around the colliery community and its brass band at the time of the pit closures and miners' strike, with the late great Pete Postlethwaite in the bandmaster role and Tara Fitzgerald as a young Coal Board researcher who also plays the cornet. In which year did the events on which the film is based take place?
  • 1982
  • 1984
  • 1986
  • 1989
Q.6
Back in the Middle Ages, when what we now call a trumpet was known as a clarion, what was the name for the then-version of the trombone?
  • Serpent
  • Sackbut
  • Psaltery
  • Slidehorn
Q.7
The bugle is probably the simplest of brass instruments, definitely in terms of mechanical construction (in being small, for its high clear pitch and portability, and in having no valves nor slide), though it certainly requires skill to play with clarity. How many pitches are there within its harmonic series, and which hence comprise the whole of the Bugle Scale?
  • Four
  • Five
  • Six
  • Eight
Q.8
The tuba may be characterised as the 'benevolent, chubby uncle' of the Brass Section, dependable for its sonority in the deepest registers in loud or more mellow music. It does not seem to lend itself to the virtuoso histrionics of higher-pitched, more nimble solo instruments such as the violin, or indeed the ringing tones of the trumpet. Yet which composer, in his 80s and with advancing deafness, nonetheless went ahead and wrote a 13-minute concerto for this instrument in the mid-20th century?
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams
  • William Walton
  • Edward Elgar
  • Benjamin Britten
Q.9
The ringing tone of brass instruments has been culturally familiar for many centuries in the form of military trumpets, posthorns . But in the German-speaking world, 'the last trump' ( the great fanfare at the Second Coming / Judgment Day) is known as : to which actual instrument does this name normally refer?
  • Trumpet
  • Trombone
  • Tuba
  • Horn
Q.10
I am sitting enjoying an ice-cream by the bandstand, in a park on a Bank Holiday afternoon; as such, I may be enjoying ~ which of the following ~ twice over?
  • Helicon
  • Cornet
  • Flugelhorn
  • Euphonium
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