Power Up: Focus on Modern Classical Music: Pretest
This is the diagnostic pretest for the Power Up: Focus on Modern Classical Music, the fifth of NAQT’s line of Power Up study guides.
A printable version with answer blanks suitable for distribution to a group of players is available for download, as is the answer key.
- What wind instrument has a high solo at the beginning of The Rite of Spring and represents the Grandfather in Peter and the Wolf?
- In what repetitive Maurice Ravel piece does the snare drum play a constant pattern underneath one long crescendo?
- What founder of the Second Viennese School wrote Pierrot Lunaire and created the twelve-tone method of composition?
- Jean Sibelius was a nationalist composer from what country, whose folklore inspired his tone poem “The Swan of Tuonela”?
- Who wrote a set of three Gymnopédies for piano, and served as a father figure to the group of French composers known as Les Six?
- What George Gershwin piece was written for Paul Whiteman’s band and opens with a clarinet glissando?
- “Nimrod” is a movement from the Enigma Variations of what composer whose first Pomp and Circumstance March is played at graduations?
- What German composer was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche to write the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra?
- What conductor of the New York Philharmonic wrote the musicals Candide and West Side Story?
- A Henry Purcell melody forms the basis of what composer’s The Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra?
- What composer wrote The Firebird and Petrushka for the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev?
- Pianist David Tudor premiered what John Cage piece in which the performer makes no sound at all?
- What French composer wrote Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and La Mer?
- What cantata by Carl Orff begins and ends with a hymn to Fate, “O Fortuna”?
- The American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass both employ what highly repetitive musical style?
- What Austrian composer, who died before finishing his Symphony No. 10, set translated Chinese poems to music in The Song of the Earth?
- What Soviet composer included a “Dance of the Knights” in his ballet Romeo and Juliet?
- Aaron Copland wrote what ballet for Martha Graham that contains a set of variations on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts”?
- What Soviet composer’s fifteen symphonies include ones nicknamed “Leningrad” and “Babi Yar”?
- What seven-movement suite by Gustav Holst opens with the piece “Mars, the Bringer of War”?