Test Item File
Part 6: The Twentieth Century: 1901–2000
1. Modernist composers created new and entirely novel approaches by
a. writing works without a tonal center or clear sense of meter.
b. using the new electronically generated sounds.
c. incorporating sounds from the music of non-Western cultures.
d. all of the above.
2. Duke Ellington’s audiences at the Savoy Ballroom in New York around 1940 were
notable for being
a. mostly lower class.
b. exclusively African American.
c. racially integrated.
d. opposed to Prohibition laws.
3. Perhaps the single most remarkable aspect of music in the twentieth century is
that for the first time
a. the piano became a fixture in the home.
b. everyone could read music.
c. listeners could hear music when and where they wanted to hear it.
d. concerts tickets were affordable to the middle class.
4. Debussy’s relationship to the artistic movement known as ________ helps give his music
the quality of “suggesting rather than stating.”
a. Expressionism
b. Impressionism
c. Romanticism
d. Serialism
5. How did Debussy elicit new timbres from the piano?
a. composing harsh tone clusters
b. instructing the performer to actually open the piano and pluck the strings by hand
c. literally removing the hammers from the instrument
d. instructing performers to play ultra-smooth lines at a persistently soft volume
6. Debussy was intent on exploring musical timbre in much the same way that
a. French chefs explored the art of cooking perfection.
b. the French symbolist poets explored sound for sound’s sake.
c. Christopher Columbus explored the New World.
d. Dvorak wrote about the New World.
7. Voiles provides the listener with
a. a strong, march-like sense of rhythm.
b. a basic harmonic progression that repeats throughout.
c. almost no sense of a fixed metrical pattern.
d. a clear-cut programmatic narrative.
8. Debussy’s works that are now recognized as masterpieces were
a. immediately hailed as a brilliant and new style.
b. not discovered until long after his death.
c. initially greeted with indifference or even scorn.
d. received with more enthusiasm in Germany than in France.
9. Which scale, often used by Debussy, undermined any sense of harmonic center?
a. diatonic
b. octatonic
c. heptatonic
d. whole tone
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10. What type of harmonic language did Ives use to challenge notions of musical correctness?
a. symmetrical
b. atonal
c. locrian
d. none of the above
11. What is the harmonic character of the string ensemble in The Unanswered Question?
a. tonal
b. metric
c. modal
d. atonal
12. What is the rhythmic nature of the woodwind quartet’s “answers” in The Unanswered
Question?
a. homophonic
b. turbulent and rhythmically uneven
c. tonal
d. hymn-like
13. How did Ives describe the nature of his “unanswered question”?
a. the question of technical progress in musical composition
b. the perennial question of existence
c. the nature of God
d. the question of enduring social inequality
14, What is one reason Charles Ives was able to write such dissonant music?
a. He did not have any musical training or background.
b. He spent part of his childhood in Darmstadt among avant-garde composers.
c. He had a close relationship with serial composer Arnold Schoenberg.
d. He didn’t worry about making money composing because of his day job as an
insurance executive.
15. Which is NOT a characteristic of Expressionism?
a. exaggerated imagery
b. extreme psychological states
c. a Symbolist fixation with sound for sound’s sake
d. a fixation on the gruesome and the stylized
16. What singing style does the soprano use in Pierrot lunaire?
a. 12-tone serialism
b. sprechstimme
c. arioso
d. recitative concitato
17. Which of the following is the best description of atonality?
a. lacking a tonal center
b. music that lacks any discernible pitch
c. rhythmically erratic tones
d. focused on only a single tone
18. How does Schoenberg musically depict Pierrot’s anguish in “Columbine”?
a. harsh percussion
b. short notes, often broken by short pauses
c. a slow, dirge-like texture
d. long notes of extremely high pitch
19. Arnold Schoenberg was
a. an Austrian by birth who moved between Vienna and Berlin, finally emigrating to
the United States when the Nazis assumed power in Germany.
b. born Jewish, converted to Christianity, and then returned to Judaism.
c. a neighbor of Shirley Temple, living just a few doors down from what would be
O. J. Simpson’s house.
d. all of the above.
20. What is the central point of action in the scenario of The Rite of Spring?
a. a Mayan ritual beheading
b. Celtic celebrations of fertility
c. a Samurai’s harakiri
d. a young girl dancing herself to death
21. What is the name for a harmonic system that uses more than one tonal center?
a. polytonal
b. bipedal
c. pentatonic
d. atonal
22. Where did Sergei Diaghilev put on his Ballet Russes?
a. Prague
b. Moscow
c. Paris
d. Vienna
23. How would one characterize the orchestra used for The Rite of Spring?
a. small, stark, and modern
b. larger than orchestras of the previous generation
c. consisting only of non-traditional instruments
d. a chamber ensemble
24. Which compositional style did Stravinsky use to reinvent himself?
a. Neoclassicism
b. Impressionism
c. 12-tone music
d. both A and C
25. Ragtime music
a. was dance music.
b. became immensely popular with the young people.
c. was a foundation of jazz music.
d. all of the above.
26. Hemiola is
a. a harmonic shift in the tonal center of a piece.
b. syncopation where patterns of two and three occur together.
c. the name of a ragtime-derived dance step.
d. both A and B
27. What is the name for a piano technique where the left hand alternates between bass notes
and middle-register chords?
a. walking bass
b. pedal tone
c. stride bass
d. sectional performance
28. Joplin called his pieces _______ ______ in an attempt to make them sound more refined
than other ragtime pieces.
a. classic rags
b. sonata songs
c. cakewalk cadences
d. jazz polonaise
29. In 1916, Scott Joplin recorded “Maple Leaf Rag” on
a. the newly invented tape recorder.
b. a piano roll designed to be played on a player piano.
c. a new device that he invented called a “sonograph.”
d. a long-playing phonograph.
30. Blues songs were originally transmitted
a. orally, without any formal notation.
b. on the radio with Bessie Smith’s famous blues voice.
c. as secret code, carefully spelled out in writing.
d. by publishers trying to get rich from selling them.
31. What is the term for a note that is performed flatter than in the standard major scale?
a. scat
b. blue note
c. 12-bar blues structure
d. wolf tone
32. Which is NOT a vocal timbre used by Robert Johnson in “Terraplane Blues”?
a. spoken word
b. growl
c. falsetto
d. hemiola
33. In what way did Robert Johnson “compose” “Terraplane Blues”?
a. He invented a new formal structure.
b. He created the words, melody, and chords, while also including stock phrases.
c. He transcribed folk melodies from the Mississippi Delta.
d. all of the above
34. Which is NOT true of Robert Johnson?
a. Legend says that he made a deal with the devil to acquire his remarkable talent.
b. He made most of his recordings in a three-year period.
c. His career was revitalized when he performed for folk revivalists in 1962.
d. He has been compared to the Faust character of German legend.
35. Which voices engage in the call-and-response texture in “Cotton Tail”?
a. voice and piano
b. bass and piano
c. trumpets and tenor saxophone
d. trombones and guitar
36. The “rhythm changes” harmonic progression used in “Cotton Tail” was written by
American composer
a. Irving Berlin.
b. Cole Porter.
c. William Grant Still.
d. George Gershwin.
37. What is the name for a groove in which the notes alternate between slightly longer and
slightly shorter durations?
a. call-and-response
b. sequence
c. metrical modulation
d. swing
38. What is the form of the head in “Cotton Tail”?
a. slightly modified AABA
b. 12-bar blues
c. expanded ritornello
d. ternary
39. Which of the following did Duke Ellington NOT do?
a. write film scores for Hollywood
b. write concertos and concert pieces, and hundreds of tunes that have become jazz
standards
c. work as a major bandleader in the swing era
d. direct opera at the Metropolitan Opera House
40. The instrumentalists who created bebop wanted jazz to
a. die out quickly so that their new style could take over.
b. be treated as serious music for listening, rather than as frivolous entertainment
for dancing.
c. slow down harmonically and melodically to allow for a meditative sensibility.
d. omit improvised sections and have the players only play the music as written.
41. Which timbre is NOT heard in the jazz combo recording of “Ornithology”?
a. drums
b. guitar
c. saxophone
d. trumpet
42. What informed Parker’s musical decisions while improvising?
a. the chord progression of the song
b. an extensive catalog of musical formulas
c. scale patterns
d. all of the above
43. Which instruments play the opening head melody in “Ornithology”?
a. trombone and guitar
b. piano and clarinet
c. trumpet and saxophones
d. saxophone and bass
44. What was the hallmark of Charlie Parker’s performance style?
a. the “Birth of Cool”
b. virtuosic soloing with lightning-fast technique
c. jazz-rock fusion
d. all of the above
45. In Piano Study in Mixed Accents, the meter is
a. duple.
b. triple.
c. compound with a hemiola effect.
d. none of the above; the piece avoids fixed metrical patterns.
46. The melodic line in Crawford’s composition lacks a sense of harmony because it
a. lacks any type of organization.
b. plays in unison with the percussion parts.
c. projects no sense of any tonal center.
d. quotes modal melodies from medieval sources.
47. What does Crawford use to give Piano Study in Mixed Accents a sense of a beginning,
middle, and end?
a. tonal shifts
b. register
c. timbral changes
d. dynamics
48. Ruth Crawford also worked arranging folksongs, and was the stepmother of folksinger
a. Bob Dylan.
b. Peter Travers.
c. Pete Seeger.
d. Phil Ochs.
49. In 12-tone composition, rows could be written
a. forward or backward.
b. inverted.
c. transposed to different pitches.
d. all of the above.
50. Neoclassicism was
a. an attempt to retain the characteristics of nineteenth-century music.
b. a way to adapt classical compositions and make them new by adding jazz chords
and non-traditional rhythms and melodies.
c. an attempt to incorporate eighteenth-century styles into a contemporary idiom.
d. a movement that sought to revive the music of the ancient Greeks.
51. The finale of Tailleferre’s Concertino for Harp and Orchestra
a. uses a balanced, traditional melodic structure.
b. quotes a melody from Haydn’s Symphony #104.
c. incorporates modern dissonant inflections in its harmony.
d. both A and C.
52. Which is NOT a way that Tailleferre conveys a Neoclassical clarity and lightness in the
finale of the Concertino for Harp and Orchestra?
a. the bright timbre of a xylophone accompaniment
b. a bright upward glissando in the harp
c. the use of trumpet and flute
d. a regular return of the rondo theme
53. Tailleferre’s group of composers, Les six, sought to
a. establish the supremacy of the 12-tone method.
b. incorporate the aesthetics of the Symbolist poets.
c. separate their French style from any German influence.
d. incorporate Wagnerian style into their dramatic works.
54. Which is a clear example of an architect’s reliance on past styles and traditions to
emphasize a sense of continuity and consistency?
a. the Empire State Building
b. the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.
c. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Water House”
d. all of the above
55. William Grant Still’s “A Black Pierrot” is based on the poetry of
a. Robert Frost.
b. Edgar Allen Poe.
c. an unknown poet.
d. Langston Hughes.
56. What style of harmony does Still employ in “A Black Pierrot”?
a. parallel
b. chromatic
c. polytonal
d. diatonic
57. Which of the following figures was NOT associated with the Harlem Renaissance?
a. Paul Robeson
b. Zora Neale Hurston
c. George Gershwin
d. William Grant Still
58. What does it mean for Still’s “A Black Pierrot” to be through-composed?
a. It has no verses.
b. The music repeats with each verse.
c. It follows a theme-and-variation type of formal structure.
d. Each strophe receives its own musical setting.
59. Which of the following was NOT a “first” for William Grant Still?
a. first African-American composer to have a symphony performed
by a major orchestra
b. first African-American to perform for a presidential inauguration
c. first African-American to conduct a major American orchestra
d. first African-American composer to have an opera performed by a major
American opera company