Music 27 Midterm Exam 2024
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Music 27
Midterm Exam
Due March 10, 2024
Add your answers to this file and upload to bCourses
by March 10, 2024, 12:00pm
1.
Listen to the opening duet from Mozart’s Italian comic opera Le nozze di Figaro
(until around 2:45):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY9gSwBWj6E
At the start of the duet, Figaro and Susanna are ignoring one another, before
they eventually come together harmoniously.
Identify two
ways in which the musical setting indicates that they are ignoring one another to begin with.
How does the musical setting show that the two characters finally pay full attention to one another?
What evidence is there, in the musical setting, that Susanna has successfully captured Figaro’s attention (and not the other way around)? [4 pts].
2.
Listen to the opening minute of this version of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah
:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnE6UBUe8Lw
Now compare it with the first minute of this one, reorchestrated by Eugene Goossens in the early twentieth century:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U12IizvoaX0
With reference to specific musical features, identify three
ways in which these two versions of the Hallelujah Chorus differ from one another.
What, in your opinion, might the early twentieth-century version of the Hallelujah Chorus imply about that later period’s view of Handel and his Messiah
?
[5 pts]
.
3.
Listen to the opening minute of this early twentieth-century concerto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klXjzrGMm3I
Stravinsky composed the piece in emulation of the concertos of J. S. Bach, like this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLj_gMBqHX8
Describe two
specific musical features that these concertos have in common.
Name two ways that you can tell, from the music, that Stravinsky’s concerto is a modern emulation of the past, rather than an attempt to imitate it precisely.
[4 pts].
4.
Listen to this piece, for viol consort, from sixteenth-century England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpisG6o2by4
Identify two
specific musical features that indicate that it was
music intended for the chamber
– which is to say, for an intimate, domestic environment.
[2 pts]
.
5.
Listen to the opening couple of minutes of this operatic aria by Bellini.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc27la95dSY
Now listen to about the same amount of this piano piece by Clara Wieck (the link starts at 2:27).
https://youtu.be/y6S3_rbDn00?t=147
What is the relationship between the piano piece and the operatic aria?
Describe one
specific feature that Wieck added to Bellini’s music.
[2 pts]
.
6.
Listen to the opening of this Kyrie (a part of a mass) by the late medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98S9spYHtJc
And now the first minute of this anonymous Credo (another part of a mass) from the eleventh century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4BZkv7Aa7o
Aside from the words themselves (and the obvious fact that there are several singers all singing the same melody in the performance of the Credo), what is the main difference in the way that the words of the Kyrie and Credo are set to music?
Provide two
reasons why settings of the Kyrie and the Credo texts almost always contrast in this way .
[3 pts].
7.
Listen until precisely 1:00 in the following example from the opera Dido and Aeneas by Purcell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf92jTgicGg
Is this an example of recitative
or aria
?
Give two
reasons for your answer.
[3 pts]
.
8.
George Lewis, in his essay “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” observes that, from the 1950s onwards, many
composers in European musical traditions became newly interested in improvisation, even though the role of improvisation had gradually become less important in European-style music. The “reappraisal of improvisation” by composers such as John Cage, writes Lewis, “may be due in no small measure to musical and social events taking place in another sector of the musical landscape.”
What kind of music, from “another sector of the musical landscape,” is Lewis talking about?
Why might this kind of music have prompted composers such as Cage to “reappraise” improvisation?
[2 pts].
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9.
Listen to this sixteenth-century English madrigal “As Vesta was from Latmos Hill,” by Thomas Weelkes (the words are on the scrolling musical score).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95DJ7oqTWK8
Describe three
examples of word painting in this madrigal (please be clear about what specific musical features respond to words or concepts in the poem).
[3 pts].
10. Listen to “Evr’y valley,” an air from Handel’s Messiah
, the biblical text here from Isiah 40:4:
“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-giSgxhBAs
Describe three
examples of word painting in this air (be clear about what specific musical features respond to words or concepts in the text)
[3 pts]
.
11.
Listen to the first couple of minutes of the Introduzione
from Mozart’s Italian comic opera Don Giovanni
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMFnP-CRF98
Identify one
specific feature of the orchestral music at the start that might indicate that the foolish servant Leporello will be the first to appear on stage.
Describe two
distinctive features of Leporello’s style of singing.
[3 pts].
12.
Listen to this passage from the serenade by Mozart popularly known as “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (stop around 3:55).
https://youtu.be/kI3PLTOvgt8?t=196
Does this part belong to the opening set-up
, the central imbroglio
, or the return and resolution
?
Give one
reason for your answer, with reference to what is happening in the music during this passage
[2 pts]
.
13. Read the opening two paragraphs from Chapter 12 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages
.
Write a short paragraph of your own (a few sentences) that
explains Rousseau’s opposition between emotion-nature-
poetry-song-melody-music
on the one hand and reason-
civilization-prose-speech-harmony-language
on the other.
Why do these groups of terms belong together, and why are the two groups opposed to one another?
[6 pts]
14. Listen to the opening two minutes or so of this version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Art Tatum (the link starts at around 0:56). Note in particular how Tatum changes his playing style around 1:14.
https://youtu.be/tuc3MYjBm2U?t=56
What is this style of jazz piano (adopted by Tatum at around 1:14) called?
Name two
musical features that are distinctive to this style
[3 pts]
.
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15. Below is part of an 1845 concert program featuring the pianist-composer Franz Liszt. The program included a free improvisation on opera tunes, a Beethoven sonata, a Chopin mazurka, and several operatic favorites by Rossini and Bellini.
Describe three
ways in which the early piano recital, in the 1830s and 1840s, would have differed from the piano recitals that many people attend today
[3 pts]
.