Friday, January 29, 2016

Time for a new music quiz

I haven't done this for a long time--largely because when I do put up a music quiz it is so hard that most readers avoid it! But let me hasten to say that this is a new quiz about music, not a quiz about new music. Whew!

There will be ten questions, the reader who gets the most right gets a lifetime subscription to The Music Salon. No t-shirt, though, we haven't got those yet. But soon. Maybe.

Oh, and no, you are not supposed to use Google.


  1. How many albums did the Sex Pistols release?
  2. What is the difference between serialism and dodecaphonic composition?
  3. Who, of these famous guitar players, is still alive? Eric Clapton, B. B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Francesco Corbetta.
  4. How many different pitches comprise an Italian augmented sixth chord?
  5. What does the title of Adele's latest album, 25, refer to?
  6. What pitch is the highest string of a Renaissance lute tuned to? A Baroque lute?
  7. How many tympani players are needed to perform Berlioz' Requiem?
  8. If you were dancing a branle, what country would you likely be in?
  9. In music theory, what is a pedal?
  10. Also in music, what does "Sturm und Drang" refer to?
UPDATE: You folks had better get busy with this quiz, because tomorrow I am going to put up the answers!

4 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

Only one, certainly. Was relieved that I managed to get even that. :-)

(And that one is because I had looked up lots of Christmas carols during the season and one of them-- I'd have to look it up again-- is sung to a branle melody. Why it stuck in my head, who knows; branle v. braule, probably.)

Bryan Townsend said...

I'll give it a few days and put up the answers.

Marc in Eugene said...

I'm investigating, when I can. Would never have thought I'd be checking out the Sex Pistols at this late date, ha.

Bryan Townsend said...

I think the inspiration for these occasional quizzes (this is, I think, the third I have put up) dates back to my days as an undergraduate. One day I walked by the bulletin board and saw that someone had put up a musical skill-testing question: "What is the order of the instrumental solos in the song "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and the Drells. I just thought that was so cool I have remembered it ever since. Cool, that is, that someone would pose that as a skill-testing question in a university department of music. I realize now that it was probably supposed to be subversive or something. In fact, I included that very question in one of my quizzes. These days, of course, with Google, it is pretty easy to find most of these answers...