Quiz 16

John Philip Sousa The leading American composer and conductor of band music was John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), nicknamed the "march king." His best-known marches include The Stars and Stripes Forever, The Washington Post, and Semper Fidelis. From 1892 to 1931 the famous 50-person Sousa Band toured across America and during the early 1900s it performed in Europe as well.

All answers are correct .Like his country, Ives's music is a polyglot, deeply rooted in the folk and popular music he knew as a boy: revival hymns, ragtime, village bands, church choirs, patriotic songs, and barn dances.

New York, New York .he American composer George Gershwin grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, New York.

become a pianist demonstrating new songs in a publisher's salesroom.

ira Gershwin George Gershwin usually collaborated with his brother, Ira, who was a lyricist.

solo clarinet Rhapsody in Blue opens with a now-famous clarinet solo that starts from a low trill, climbs the scale, and then slides up to a high "wailing" tone.

wrote film scores, concert works, operas, and band arrangements. In 1935, after Still was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote film scores, concert works, and operas. He was the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1936. He was also the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company—Troubled Island, about the Haitian slave rebellion, in 1949.

jazz. When Copland returned to New York from Paris, in 1925, American music was associated with the jazz style. There was no unique "American" sound, something Copland helped to define over the next decades.

All answers are correct. Copland's music drew on American folklore, jazz, revival hymns, cowboy songs, and other folk tunes. His scores for films and his patriotic works also reached a mass public, and his name became synonymous with American music.

ballet score. We now know Appalachian Spring as a symphonic concert piece, but it originated as a ballet score for Martha Graham, the great modern dancer and choreographer.

five variations on the Shaker melody Simple Gifts. The section of Appalachian Spring that originally accompanied "Scenes of daily activity for the Bride and her Farmer-husband" features the Shaker melody, Simple Gifts.

nationalistic and uses Argentinean folk material, including popular dances. Estancia Suite, by Alberto Ginastera, was a work rooted in Argentinean folk tradition. It has a distinct national flavor because of its setting on an Argentinean ranch, and its use of musical idioms associated with the gaucho, or horseman of the plain.

4 the Estancia Suite has four movements: (1) Los trabajadors (The Land Workers), (2) Danza del Trigo (Wheat Dance), (3) Los Peones de Hacienda (The Cattlemen), (4) Danza Final (Final Dance): Malambo.

Aaron Copland. In 1945 Ginastera went with his family to the United States, where he studied with Aaron Copland at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

a series of rhythms, dynamics, or tone colors could serve as a unifying idea. The techniques of the twelve-tone system, also known as serialism, came to be used to organize elements of music other than just pitch, such as rhythm, dynamics, and tone color. Recall that in early twelve-tone music the system was used primarily to order pitch relationships. After 1950, a series of durations (rhythmic values), dynamic levels, or tone colors also could serve as a unifying idea. A rhythmic or dynamic series might be manipulated like the series of twelve tones.

serialism The use of a series, or ordered group of musical elements (e.g., pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and tone color), to organize several dimensions of a composition is called serialism.

chooses pitches, tone colors, and rhythms by random methods. In chance music, composers choose pitches, tone colors, and rhythms by random methods such as throwing coins. They may also ask performers to choose the ordering of the musical material, or even to choose much of the material itself.

a steady pulse, clear tonality, and insistent repetition of short melodic patterns. Minimalist music is characterized by steady pulse, clear tonality, and insistent repetition of short melodic patterns. Its dynamic level, texture, and harmony tend to stay constant for fairly long stretches of time, creating a trancelike or hypnotic effect.

performers Electronic instruments let composers control tone color, duration, dynamics, and pitch with unprecedented precision. Composers are no longer limited by human performers. For the first time, they can work directly in their own medium—sound. There is no more need for intermediaries, that is, performers.

microtones Intervals smaller than the half step are known as microtones. Such intervals, like quarter tones, have long been used in nonwestern music, but they have only recently become an important resource for western composers.

all the above Varèse's Poème électronique, one of the earliest masterpieces of electronic music, was created in a tape studio. The 8-minute work was designed to be heard within the pavilion of the Philips Radio Corporation at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Varèse worked in collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier, who selected a series of images—photographs, paintings, and writing—that were projected on the walls as the music was heard.

quotation music Zwilich's Concerto Grosso 1985 is an example of quotation music. In the outer movements of the work, Zwilich juxtaposes parts of a Handel sonata with original passages.

anton Webern. Many composers of the 1950s and 1960s chose to write music that was stylistically reminiscent of Anton Webern. Webern's style answered the needs of the post-World War II generation: his music had a lean, "modern" sound, in which melodic lines are "atomized" into tiny fragments that are heard in widely separated registers and framed by moments of silence.

-araon copland -edgar vare'se