Music Quizzes

"Jazz babies" or "_______" were the emancipated young women with short skirts and bobbed hair of the Jazz Age.

flappers

Starting around 1910 the craze for orchestrated versions of ragtime songs gave rise to a succession of fads loosely based on Black styles, including the Texas Tommy, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the Boston dip, the one-step, and-most popular of all-the _______.

fox-trot

In the 1890s the first "nickelodeons"-machines that played the latest hits for a nickel-were set up in public places. (These machines later became known as "_______.")

jukeboxes

The real-time playing of media over the internet without the need for users to download the content first is referred to as _____

streaming

Initially played by musicians in Argentina's capital city of Buenos Aires, the _____ was influenced by the Cuban habanera rhythm, the African-influenced milonga, Italian and Spanish popular songs, and the songs of the guitar-playing Argentine gauchos

tango

The onset of quarantining in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 led to a dramatic decline in creativity and an accompanying decline in the purchsase of music creation software such as Apple's GarageBand, as well as musical instrument sales by online vendors such as Sweetwater, Guitar Center, Reverb, and other retailers.

False

From which stream of influence does the "high lonesome sound" commonly heard in country music hail?

Anglo-American stream

Thomas Alva Edison invented the flat gramophone disc in 1887.

False

Until the mid-1990s, the stylistic mainstream of American popular music was largely oriented toward the tastes of white, middle- or upper-class, protestant, urban people

False

Which of the following is NOT true about James Reese Europe?

He was a cornet player and leader of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band

Cuban dance styles of this time came from what two genres?

Son and Danzon

Who was likely the first person in the United States to make a living as a full-time professional songwriter?

Stephen Collins Foster

What was the first sound film?

The Jazz Singer

The _______ is a dance in triple-time with a strong emphasis on every third beat.

waltz

Which legendary French-born superstar of tango was inspired by operatic bel canto singing and the criollo songs of the Argentine gauchos?

Carlos Gardel

Which ensemble recorded "Dipper Mouth Blues"?

Creole Jazz Band

Which white banjo virtuoso led the Virginia Minstrels?

Daniel Emmett

Which of the following is true about the Afro-Cuban rumba?

It accompanies dances featuring sexual role-playing and was originally suppressed by Cuban authorities.

Which of the following is true about the tango?

It developed during the late nineteenth century in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Which of the following is true about the diddley bow?

It is a musical instrument adapted from the African one-stringed zither.

Which is true about Brazillian bossa nova music?

It was popularized in the United States by songs like "The Girl from Ipanema"

Which of the following became the first nationwide commercial radio network in 1926?

National Broadcasting Company (NBC)

Although jazz originated in the city of _______, the first recordings of the new music were made in New York City and Chicago.

New Orleans

Which is the best definition of "strophe"?

One repetition of verse-and-chorus within a song's structure

Which group recorded the first jazz record in 1917?

Original Dixieland Jazz Band

Who led the Ambassador Orchestra, the most successful dance band of the 1920s?

Paul Whiteman

Arranger

Rework songs for a different performance

A repeated pattern designed to generate rhythmic momentum is called what?

Riff

Which of the following was an influential ragtime pianist and composer?

Scott Joplin

Which southern string band did James Gideon (Gid) Tanner lead?

Skillet LIckers

_____ refers to rhythmic patterns in which the stresses occur on what are ordinarily weak beats, thus displacing or suspending the sense of metric regularity

Syncopation

What Latin American dance was seen as a blend of European ballroom dance music, Cuban habanera, Italian light opera, and ballads of the Argentine gauchos (cowboys)?

Tango

Which Latin dance style did Irene and Vernon Castle and movie star Rudolph Valentino help popularize in the early twentieth century?

Tango

Which film released in 1927 became the first to exploit sound successfully?

The Jazz Singer

What was the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character?

The minstrel show

Consider the following statement and choose the best response: Many dance bands in the 1920s specialized in one of three main categories: "hot," "sweet," and "Latin."

The statement is true

Which of the following is true about African American ballads of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

They celebrated the exploits of Black heroes and "bad men"

Which song recorded by the Paul Whiteman Band sold 2 million copies and featured the Swanee whistle (slide whistle), a novelty that helped sell the record?

Whispering

Composer

Writer of the music

Lyricist

Writer of the words

Stephen Foster was the first person in the United States to make a living off the money he earned at concert performances.

False

The Castle's influence on social dancing was solely due to their dancing prowess.

False

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was the first white performer to establish a wide reputation as a "blackface" entertainer.

False

Which of the following is true about songwriter Stephen Foster?

He embraced both genteel traditions and less highly regarded but popular traditions such as minstrelsy

Who invented the phonograph?

Thomas Alva Edison

Which white actor invented the minstrel character "Jim Crow"?

Thomas Dartmouth Rice

Who played a large role in the rapid increase in minstrelsy's popularity?

Thomas Dartmouth Rice

Who was the most influential songwriter of American popular song during the nineteenth century?

Stephen Foster

The arranger of a song decides which instruments to use as accompaniment and what key the song should be in.

True

The best-known composer of ragtime music was an African American composer and pianist named Scott Joplin.

True

The emergence of ragtime in the 1880s evidenced the growing influence of African American styles on popular music.

True

The job of song pluggers was to promote the sheet music for popular songs produced by their various companies.

True

The minstrel show is the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment to be regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character.

True

The type of m usic most closely associated with the mid-19th century's "great awakening" was a body of scared songs called spirituals

True

Vaudeville, a theatrical form descended from music hall shows and minstrelsy, consisted of a wide variety of acts that was used to promote popular music.

True

By the turn of the twentieth century, what form of popular theater became the most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan Alley songs?

Vaudeville

Which couple were arguably the biggest media superstars of the years around World War I?

Vernon and Irene Castle

_______ was the center of the commercial songwriting and publishing business in New York from approximately the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century.

Tin Pan Alley

Ballroom dancing focused more on uniformity and restraint than on improvisation or the expression of emotion.

True

Critical listening is listening that consciously seeks out meaning in music by drawing on knowledge of how music is put together, its cultural significance, and its historical development

True

During the 1920s unprecedented profit levels in the music business led to a bolstering of the centers of influence established at the end of the nineteenth century, especially the big music publishing firms and record companies in New York City.

True

Emerging in New Orleans, Jazz arose from the interaction between Black and Creole Musicians.

True

Other names for jazz were "jass" and "hot music"

True

American jazz music got its start in Harlem

False

Between 1912 and 1918, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did more than anyone to change the course of social dancing in America.

False

By far the most successful dance band of the 1920s was the Ambassador Orchestra, led by James Reese Europe.

False

Dance, while an important factor in later popular music, was only used with Classical music in the early 1900s

False

Originally an oral tradition passed down in unwritten form, ballads were eventually circulated on large sheets of paper called handbills, the ancestors of today's sheet music

False

Popular music has been wholly successful in avoiding the perpetuation of stereotypes

False

Popular music is not closely tied to stereotypes

False

A key element in Vernon and Irene Castles' success was their decision to hire a brilliant young African American musician whose full name was _______ as their musical director.

James Reese Europe

"_______," performed by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, became the first international American song hit.

Jim Crow

Which of the following became the conductor of the U.S. Marine Band?

John Philip Sousa

Who was the greatest influence to the surge of popularity of Wind band music from 1890 to World War 1?

John Philip Sousa

What is formal analysis of music?

Listening for musical structure

Engineer

Make decisions about the balance of parts and use of effects

In 1925 electric recording, which used a new device called the _______, replaced the older system of acoustic recording, in which performers had to project into a huge megaphone.

Microphone

What role did song pluggers play in the music industry from the nineteenth century until the 1920s?

They promoted songs and convinced big stars to perform them

In rock music, the accenting of the second and fourth beat of a four-beat bar is referred to as the _____

backbeat

A _____ is a type of song consisting usually of verses set to a repeating melody in which a story-often romantic, historic, or tragic-is sung in narrative fashion

ballad

Until the early twentieth century, social dancing among white Americans was dominated by offshoots of the _______ dance, or country dance, tradition (in which teams of dancers formed geometric figures such as lines, circles, or squares).

contra

The Cuban conjunto developed in the island's countryside around 1880 and was initially performed by farmers and workers who toiled in the island's sugar plantation economy.

False

The contra dance, which first rose to popularity in the United States in the 1820s, was initially regarded as an "indecorous exhibition" of intimacy between men and women, and as a threat to public morality.

False

The first Latin American style to have a major international impact was the Cuban tango, an African-influenced variant of the French country dance tradition

False

The huge region of Africa from which enslaved people were drawn-the areas bordering more than eight thousand miles of Atlantic coastline stretching from current-day Senegal to Angola-shared a singular, monolithic culture

False

The saloon-a term that by the mid-1910s had come to signify any establishment offering food, drinks, floor shows, and dancing-became both a laboratory for new dance steps and a major source of employment for musicians.

False

The year 1919 saw "Dardanella" become the first hit song to be popularized in recorded form before it was released as sheet music.

False

Tin Pan Alley was the center of the commercial songwriting and publishing business in Chicago from approximately the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century.

False

Following on the heels of the ragtime fad, the jazz craze represented the intensification of African American influence on the musical tastes and buying habits of white Americans.

True

Has technology affected our relationship to music, and more importantly, to other people?

True

Informal worship spaces organized by enslaved people were referred to as "hush quarters"

True

Louis Armstrong's vocal style, employing nonsense syllables, is known as scat singing.

True

Much of the history of American popular music may be broadly conceptualized in terms of a center-periphery model

True