Final Exam Flashcards by Micah Strong

Match Each work to its creator below
Das Jahr
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Nocturne in D-Flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2
Symphonie Fantastique

Fanny Hensel
Felix Mendelssohn
Fryderyk Chopin
Hector Berlioz

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True/False
In the 19th century, upper-class women such as Fanny Hensel were generally discouraged from pursuing professional musical careers.

True

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What Italian term indicates a slight anticipation or delay in a melody while the accompaniment continues in strict time, or a departure from the regular pulse in both parts at once?

Rubato

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A composition intended primarily to demonstrate and develop a particular technical facility on an instrument, and which may sometimes be performed in concert settings, is called a(n)

etude or étude.

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A significant difference between the piano compositions of Fryderyk Chopin and Robert Schumann is that

Chopin’s piano music is mainly composed in abstract lyrical and dance forms, while Schumann’s comprises mostly descriptive or evocative dance pieces.

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A stylized Polish dance in triple meter with an accented second or third beat, championed by Chopin, was the

mazurka

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The principal theme of Symphonie fantastique, transformed several times in the course of the work’s movements, is called the

idée fixe.

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E.T.A. Hoffmann regarded music as an ideal art because

it was free from the finite concreteness of language and the material world.

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True/False
The first movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto differs from a standard Classical concerto form in that Mendelssohn places the soloist’s cadenza at the end of the development section rather than near the end of the recapitulation.

True

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In 1829, a performance of __________ stimulated a revival of interest among musicians in its composer’s long-ignored works.

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion

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Chopin’s piano music invokes the styles and techniques of all the following except

Afro-Caribbean folk dance.

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Felix Mendelssohn’s interest in composing oratorios was largely motivated by his knowledge of

oratorios by Handel and the polyphonic techniques of Bach.

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Between about 1780 and 1840, average orchestra sizes increased by approximately how much?

200%

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True/False
Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28, are organized in a series of chromatically ascending keys, reflecting the influence of J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

False

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In the last movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, the principal theme of the work is changed into a version different from its original statement in all of the following ways except

mode

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In the 1820s and 1830s, Mendelssohn played a pivotal role in reviving the vocal music of

J.S. Bach.

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True/False
Like Friedrich Wieck, Fanny Hensel’s father encouraged her to become a professional concert pianist.

False

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The literary source for Berlioz’s “dramatic symphony” The Damnation of Faust is a work by

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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Schumann’s Fourth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto

both contain movements that are linked to each other without pause.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works provided inspiration for

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade.

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True/False
Before the 20th century, there were no African American composers of classical music.

False

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Match each work to the genre it represents
Il barbiere di Siviglia
Les Hugenots
Orphee aux enfers
Aida

Bel canto opera
Grand Opera
Opera Bouffe
Grand Opera

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True/False
By the 1830s, opera in Italy and France had become an elite, exclusive genre, divorced from the market for popular music.

False

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The tempo di mezzo section in a typical Gioachino Rossini opera scene is

a sudden interruption or change in a character’s circumstances.

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The operatic style of the early 19th century that emphasized fluent vocal technique, beauty of tone throughout a singer's range, agility, and the ability to sing sustained lyrical melodies is now known as

bel canto.

True/False French grand opera plots of the 1820s and 1830s were mainly based on ancient myths and legends, emulating the 17th-century genre of tragédie lyrique.

False

Una voce poco fa and Casta diva both

contain cantabile and cabaletta sections.

The concluding, rhythmically lively, virtuosic section of a typical Rossini opera scene is called the

Cabaletta

True/False Exoticism as a stylistic topic in European music first emerged in the 1820s in the wake of Napoleon's North African military excursions.

False

In early 19th-century Paris, a crucial difference between the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique was that

spoken dialogue was permitted in works performed at the Opéra-Comique, but not in works performed at the Paris Opéra.

What is one reason that Italian opera composers of the 1820s and 1830s were motivated to produce a large body of works?

their works lacked copyright protection

Compared to Rossini's operas, Vincenzo Bellini's operas tended

more frequently to use choruses.

Verdi's middle- and late-period operas frequently adopt

a blending of solos, ensembles, and choruses into more continuous musical acts.

The operatic genre that emphasized romantic love stories in contexts of historical conflict, augmented by ballet, elaborate staging, and large casts of soloists and choral singers, is known as

grand opera.

True/False Bellini's operas are distinguished among Italian bel canto works for their especially long-breathed, embellished, melancholic melodies.

True

The libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata was remarkable in its day because it

was one of the first tragic operas whose plot was contemporary rather than set in the historical past.

The plot of La traviata is connected to the mid-19th-century artistic trend of

realism

True/False In his last two operas, Verdi resumed his use of the discrete musico-dramatic units of the four-part Rossinian scene structure in nostalgic homage to his great predecessor.

False

The first aria sung by a principal character in an Italian opera is sometimes called a

cavatina.

What US-born composer is famous for his parlor songs (some of which are associated with minstrel shows)?

Stephen Foster

Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation strongly influenced the representation of

sexuality and social constraint in Tristan und Isolde.

The dissonance heard in the excerpt

resolves on the last note of the excerpt.

Match each work to the genre it represents. Der Freischutz Aida Il barbiere di Sigivlia Les Huguenots

German Romantic Opera Grand Opera Bel Canto Opera Grand Opera

A distinguishing feature of early nineteenth-century German operas such as Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz was their

integration of folk or folklike melodies.

The 18th- and 19th-century style of theatrical delivery in which characters speak over orchestral accompaniment is called

melodrama.

The Wolf's Glen Scene in Weber's Der Freischütz features

an emphasis on a tritone that reflects the scene's discordant, sinister atmosphere.

True/False The "Tristan chord" heard at the start of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde is best understood as a Neapolitan chord in the key of D minor.

False

Wagner's notion of an ideal drama based on the collaborative integration of poetry, scenic design, staging, movement, and music is expressed by his German term

Gesamtkunstwerk.

In Wagner's view of music history, the most important precedent for his own synthesis of drama and music was

Beethoven's symphonies.

Wagnerian leitmotives are distinguished from the reminiscence motives used by Verdi and Bizet in that

leitmotives connote dramatic and character development through their gradual musical transformation and combination with other leitmotives, while reminiscence motives tend to maintain a single, static meaning.

Der fliegender Holländer most clearly illustrates Wagner's knowledge of

German Romantic opera.

Wagner's The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama are historically important documents mainly because of

their explanation of the poetic and musical techniques of a new kind of music drama.

German Romantic opera is distinguished most sharply from contemporary French and Italian opera by

its focus on natural and supernatural landscapes as important dramaturgical elements.

True/False Wagner drew the majority of the plots of his mature operas from myth and medieval epic.

True

Which work introduced German Romantic opera?

Der Freischütz

What is one thing that distinguishes Wagner's leitmotives from typical melodic material?

Leitmotives are repeated and transformed, and in doing so become part of the storytelling.

In The Artwork of the Future, what did Wagner believe was the way to continue writing new music in the wake of Beethoven's successes?

combining instruments and voice

rural settings, supernatural events, and spoken dialogue

German Romantic Opera

larger-than-life mythological plots, enormous voices and orchestras, and a lack of traditional distinctions between numbers

Wagner's music dramas

enormous casts, mechanical spectacle, and historical settings

French Grand Opera

lyric voices, an emphasis on star singers, and scene form

bel canto opera

True/False In his essay Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music), Wagner praised Jewish contributions to German music.

False

The character of the excerpt is best described as a(n)

triumphant march.

Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is subtitled Pathétique, evoking

Beethoven's Op. 13 Piano Sonata.

True/False Brahms first established himself as a promising young musician in the early 1850s with the premiere of his first symphony, which was closely modeled on Beethoven.

False

Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is atypical of multi movement symphonies in that

it ends with a solemn slow movement.

The large-scale structures, great length, lush harmonies, and sequential repetition of entire passages in Bruckner's symphonies is evidence of the influence of the music of _______.

Wagner.

True/False The Cecilian movement of the late 19th century called for the elimination of archaic Renaissance counterpoint from modern music.

False

A core tenet of Eduard Hanslick's aesthetics is that

musical beauty resides solely in tones and their combinations.

A composition constructed of repetitions of an ostinato bass and sometimes an associated harmonic progression, in which each repetition is an opportunity for variation is called a(n) _______.

chaconne, passacaglia, or passacaille

The debate between advocates of program music and absolute music emerged in print during the

1850s.

True/False Liszt's role as an advocate of cutting-edge orchestral and piano music led him to ignore and even scorn contemporary operatic music and culture.

False

By 1850, Europe's musical culture had changed such that

an unprecedented variety of historical and modern repertoire was available to audiences.

The early 19th-century violin virtuoso upon whom Liszt modeled his own ambitions as a pianist was

Niccolò Paganini.

The fourth movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony testifies to the composer's interest in

Baroque variation technique.

An important precedent for mid-19th-century techniques of thematic transformation is found in

Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

Simultaneous use of duple and triple divisions of the beat is a hallmark of the composer _______.

Brahms.

Liszt's Les Préludes and Brahms's Piano Quintet in F Minor both

use some kind of thematic transformation procedure.

True/False Tchaikovsky's touring activities took him as far afield as New York.

True

Match the compositional technique to the composer Thematic transformation leitmotive idee fixe developing variation

Liszt Wagner Berlioz Brahms

A symphonic poem is a

one-movement programmatic work for orchestra.

How did Tchaikovsky respond to competing tendencies among Russian musicians to either embrace Western styles or remain uniquely Russian?

He sought a middle ground between the two.

Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler

composed program music in the tradition of Berlioz and Liszt.

True/False The large orchestras available to Mahler encouraged his persistent use of massive blocks of orchestral sound, and led him to neglect more delicate chamber music textures.

False

Musorgsky's harmonic progressions of triads related by thirds demonstrates his familiarity with the harmonic language of the western European pianist-composer

Franz Liszt.

The expressive power of works like Salome and Elektra is achieved in large part through the use of

oppositions between dissonance and consonance, and chromaticism and diatonicism.

Which predecessors most strongly influenced Strauss's techniques of opera composition

Wagner and Mozart

True/False The "Mighty Handful" composers were inspired less by Classical symphonists such as Mozart than by progressive composers like Liszt and Berlioz.

True

True/False Symphonic poems and tone poems were based on narrative episodes derived from literature, but could not adequately represent, and so avoided dealing with, abstract philosophical texts.

False

All the following composers frequently appropriated folk songs or folklike melodies in their music except

Hugo Wolf.

True/False Because of his formal conservatory training in Leipzig, Edvard Grieg became a cosmopolitan composer who rejected the folkloric nationalism adopted by many other 19th-century composers.

False

The "Mighty Handful" composers were united in their rejection of

academic musical training.

Hugo Wolf brought Wagner's ideas to the

Lied.

Who said that writing a symphony is to "construct a world"?

Gustav Mahler

Richard Strauss's orchestral output consisted primarily of

tone poems.

One striking feature of Strauss's Salome was

music that seemed to be in two keys at once.

The group of Russian composers who sought artistic independence from Western influence were known as the

Mighty Handful.

What is one way that realism emerges in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov?

The vocal lines imitate Russian speech

Edvard Grieg was from

Norway.

One characteristic trait of much Russian music of the time is

successive blocks of material.

Carmen

George Bizet in 1875

Il Barbiere Di Sivglia

Giaachino Rossini in 1816

Norma

Vincenzo Bellini in 1831

La Triviata

Giuseppe Verdi 1853

Der Freushutz

Carl Maria Von Weber in 1821

Trios Studies de concert, No. 3

Franz Liszt in 1845

Tristian und Isolde

Richard Wegner in 1859

Symphony No. 4 in E minor

Johannes Brahms in 1885

Symphony No. 6

Piotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky in 1893

Boris Godunov

Modest Musorgsky in 1872

Gretchen am Spinnrade

Franz Schubert 1814

Im Wunderschonen Monat Mai

Tobert Schumann 1840

Piano Trio in G Minor

Clara Schumann in 1846

Violin Concerto in E Minor

Felix Mendelssohn in 1844

Nocturne in D-Flat

Fryderyk Chopin in 1835

Symphonie Fantastique

Hector Berlioz in 1840

Slavonic Dances

Antonio Dvorak in 1878

Boris Godunov

Modest Mussorgsky in 1872

Gaelic Symphony

Amy Beach in 1894

Explain the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk

Translated to a total work of art. It was conceptualized by Wagner. This encouraged artists to use emotional responses and to bring out emotions that were hidden in a dream state. It had an incomplete form. Wagner's Die Walkure is an example of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Describe the involvement of African Americans in classical music in the 19th century.

Mainly learned from European musicians. Music was shorter. Music was for social dance music, descriptive piano music, and patriotic tunes. After emancipation there were more opportunities to receive an education. Many African Americans listened to German music as a way to show that they were equal in taste and talents. Blind Tom was a Black composer.

Describe Brahm's relationship with past musical styles.

Brahm's embraced the past styles of composition and added innovations to them. He used traditional forms and genres like the sonata form and symphony, string quartet, sonata, and concerto. He used these with newer influences of folk music and modern harmonies. Brahms used the older, standard genres.

How was Nationalism expressed in 19th century music.

Nationalism would use folk music to portray a musical and political nationalism. If the composer has a source of national pride, and if the material is seen as national heritage it is nationalism. Some of these pieces became a symbol for the nation. Bedrich Smetana was a nationalist that composed Ma vlast (my Fatherland). He used Czhech folk type music for the piece.

Final Exam Flashcards

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