MA Exam 5

Profoundly influenced by folk music, he traveled throughout Eastern Europe and parts of North Africa using Edison's newly invented recording machine to capture peasant music. His mind became saturated with driving rhythms, odd-number meters, and unusual scales of folk music. Outspoken in his criticism of Fascism and the Hungarians who supported Nazi Germany, he cut his ties to his German publishing firms and, to his great financial detriment, banned performances of his works in Germany and Italy. He fled to the United States in 1940, and died of leukemia in New York City.

Bartók

An advocate for what has come to be called "chance music," this composer felt it was unnecessary for music to develop, climax, or be goal-oriented. One composition consisted of amplifying and broadcasting the sounds resulting from chopping vegetables, grinding them up, and drinking the juice.

Cage

This composer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and after receiving a rudimentary musical education in New York City He sailed for Paris to broaden his artistic horizons. After three years, he returned to the U. S., determined to compose a distinctly American style of music. In the 1930s he began to make a deliberate appeal to ordinary citizens by working on a series of projects based on rural and western American ideas. He musical style is characterized by the use of folk songs and popular elements, tonal harmony, and a clear, luminous orchestration.

Copland

Identify the group that is limited to modern composers.

Copland, Ives, Bartók, Zwilich

After a promising start - while a student he won the prestigious Prix de Rome for composition - he devoted his early years to honing his compositional skills and seeking an original style, yet at the age of 31 he noted with characteristic irony that he still had not written a masterpiece. A year later he did just that with his Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun.

Debussy

As part of his drive to eradicate traditional Western influence in the Soviet Union, Stalin actively supported composers who wrote in the modern atonal and twelve-tone style.

False

When modern composers used shocking dissonances to shake their listeners out of a state of complacency with Romanticism, audiences were typically grateful and praised the newest musical efforts.

False

This composer was active between 1898 and 1917, but considered the art of composition a private matter and decided against earning a livelihood in music. Instead he pursued a successful career in business, only composing after working hours. He founded a company with a friend in 1907, which eventually became the largest insurance company in the United States and made him a very wealthy man. Initially his works were rarely performed, but word of these unusual creations - he was the first to employ polytonality extensively - gradually spread in the 1930s and he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in music for a symphony that had been composed forty years earlier.

Ives

This style of modern music takes a very small amount of musical material and repeats it over and over to form a composition.

Minimalism

The term "Impressionism" was first associated with which particular art form?

Painting

Which philosophy of art came to the forefront after the Second World War and is characterized by the following ideas: art is not for the elite, but for all; all art is of equal potential, so there is no "high" or "low" art; the art of one individual or culture is as important as the next.

Postmodernism

A serious composer, he wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, and concertos and sonatas for the piano. Today, however, he is primarily remembered for such lighter, popular works as film scores (Lieutenant Kijé and Alexander Nevsky) and Peter and the Wolf. His ballet on the tragedy Romeo and Juliet was given a happy ending to please Soviet censors.

Prokofiev

By 1923 this composer developed a new way of writing music known as twelve-tone composition. It solved the problem of formal anarchy in totally chromatic music by providing a method that created musical unity among pitches that were equal in significance.

Schoenberg

Which composer is associated with the terms atonal music, Sprechstimme, Expressionism, and twelve-tone composition? He was also a talented painter, and teacher of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, two important twentieth-century composers. These three comosers developed a close association that has since been known as the "Second Viennese School."

Schoenberg

This composer's relationship with the Soviet government was complex and ever-changing; during the 1930s and 1940s he was the most popular composer of Russian high art music and his spirit of resistance to Nazi Germany won him the Stalin Medal for service to the state. He was officially denounced as "formalistic" twice, which caused him to hide his most progressive scores, although his international reputation gave him a measure of protection from exile or execution.

Shostakovich

This composer was born in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, experienced his early successes in Paris in the years immediately preceding WWI when came to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who made him the principal composer of the Ballets russe. His three most important ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring brought him international fame. He died in New York in 1971. During his career he created masterpieces in many different genres, and he personified the cultural pluralism and stylistic diversity of cutting-edge art music.

Stravinsky

Born in China, this composer was raised in a rural environment full of music, magic, and ritual. Sent to a commune during the Cultural Revolution, his job was to plant rice, but he was later summoned to play and arrange music for a provincial opera company. While his early compositions have an atonal, dissonant sound, he later began to include traditional Chinese sounds in his compositions. He has since composed film scores, an opera, and joined with cellist Yo-Yo Ma on The Silk Road Project.

Tan Dun

Debussy's approach to composition (replacing the centrality of melody with color and texture) was adopted by the revolutionary figures of twentieth-century music.

True

Quarter-tone music consists of sounds in which the smallest interval is not the chromatic half step, but half of a half step.

True

To be identified as a "formalist" composer in Stalinist Russia was tantamount to a death sentence.

True

This composer wrote Poème électronique for a multimedia exhibit inside the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. It is one of the first examples of musique concrète and a landmark in the history of synthetic music.

Varèse

Music without a key center is considered:

atonal

This compositional method involves an element of unpredictability (rolling dice, choosing cards, etc.) or whimsy on the part of the performers. It is especially popular with avant-garde composers.

chance music

Which response does not apply to the "prepared piano"?

featured in the composition 4'33"

Identify the style trait that is not typical of modern music.

long, singable lines with powerful climaxes and chromatic inflections for expressiveness

Which trait is not a characteristic of Impressionist music?

long, singable lines with powerful climaxes and chromatic inflections for expressiveness

What is the term for music in which the composer works directly with sounds recorded on magnetic tape, not with musical notation and performers?

musique concrète

The simultaneous sounding of two keys or tonalities is known as:

polytonality

Which family of instruments, traditionally favored by Romantic composers, was "de-emphasized" in the music of modern period?

strings

Which statement accurately describes the Expressionist movement?

the reality of an object is replaced by the emotion it generates in the artist; it emphasizes the emotional states of anxiety and fear

Which idea best describes the purpose of twelve-tone music?

to create musical unity while guaranteeing the perfect equality of a pitches so that none seems like a tonal center

What is the term that describes when a pianist plays - usually with a fist or forearm - a dissonant sounding of several pitches, each only a half step away from the other, in a densely packed chord?

tone cluster