Q.1
During the cantata , besides writing such rich and intricate choral parts that their first professional singers allegedly threatened to go on strike, composer William Walton calls on the entire chorus to shout (deliberately loud but unpitched, rather than singing it) one particular word: what word is it?
  • 'God'
  • 'Slain'
  • 'King'
  • 'Cursed'
Q.2
Which of these is the odd one out?
  • Lungs
  • Larynx
  • Legs
  • Lips
Q.3
How high does the soprano/treble soloist have to sing during the Allegri , as famously performed each Ash Wednesday at the Vatican and elsewhere?
  • B♭ above the treble stave
  • B natural above the treble stave
  • C, two octaves above Middle C
  • C# just over two octaves above Middle C
Q.4
One of the most sublime pieces of choral music is Mozart's communion motet (K.618, written for the festival of Corpus Christi in 1791). How many bars of music does it contain?
  • 42 bars
  • 46 bars
  • 48 bars
  • 50 bars
Q.5
About 100 years ago, astute and sensitive musicians were aware that modern life and technology were likely to drown out the old traditions of folksong: simple songs that people had sung for generations as they walked and worked . The threats seemed to come from the rise of 'mechanical music on demand' (from the gramophone and radio), the pace of life, and that people were somehow less likely to sing, singly or severally, in moving motor vehicles. All but one of the following were gathering, recording, notating, publishing and otherwise actively preserving and using folksong at around this time; who was the odd one out?
  • Cecil Sharp
  • Bela Bartok
  • Jan Sweelinck
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams
Q.6
Yma Sumac (1922-2008) was a remarkable singer who produced, among much else, an album entitled ('Andean Fire'). Why were she, and this phrase, so significant?
  • She had flame-red hair and sang in a Latin style akin to Flamenco
  • She was both attractive and eccentric in performance, and had a double-act with Carmen Miranda (she of the fruit-bedecked hats)
  • There were wildfires in the Andes shortly before she launched the album
  • Her upbringing in the thin air of the Peruvian Andes gave her a vocal range of over four octaves, compared with barely half that for most conventional trained singers
Q.7
Which of these vocal types is the odd one out?
  • Coloratura
  • Mezzo
  • Baritone
  • Spinto
Q.8
Readers of all taste-levels and none will presumably be aware of the stage show and film in which, fairly simply put, our Art wins the day in terms of personal relationships and international / political safety. The governess Maria (a 'failed nun') quite early introduces the seven children of widowed Capt. von Trapp to the pleasures of singing in the clear Tyrolean air; her first combined practical and theory lesson centres on the song . But the tonic sol-fa names of the degrees of the scale go back a great deal further than that ... how far, and to what?
  • An eleventh-century Latin hymn, each of whose lines began one note above the previous one, and these were the first syllables of each such line
  • An experimental system developed by a philospher who was friends with many of the 'first Viennese school' (Beethoven & co.) and who used to attend the Schubertiade
  • Isaac Newton, who also considered assigning one of the classic rainbow colours to each of the degrees of the scale
  • Elizabethan England, as evidenced by 'scat'-style (nonsense syllables) singing by drunken characters in the comedies of Shakespeare (rather than just a madrigal-style 'Fa-la-la')
Q.9
There was a healthy tradition of polyphony (singing in parts) and antiphony (singers, or sub-groups, singing 'against' one another across a large space such as the interior of a major church or cathedral) by the Tudors ~ say, four or even five centuries ago. Like any other technique (such as organ-building), there would always be the implicit challenge to 'go one bigger', even, than the vocal and brass choirs of that golden age in Venice. Thomas Tallis (1505 - 85) famously made a setting of the liturgical text ... for how many voices?
  • 36 singers divided into 6 choirs
  • 40 singers, as 8 choirs of 5 parts each
  • 48 singers ( = 8 x 6-part semi-choruses)
  • 60 singers ( = 1 5-part choir to represent each of the 12 Apostles, or Tribes of Israel)
Q.10
We are probably now fairly sure what a 'vocalist' is, but what is a Vocalise?
  • A proprietary brand of pastille, aimed at and widely used by singers to keep their throat clear and lubricated
  • A song without any words, sung quasi-instrumentally to an open vowel such as 'ah'
  • An early electronic synthesiser that mimicked the timbre of the human voice
  • A form of avant-garde 'workshop' in which people would sing at random
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