American Composers
This American composer wrote the Afro-American Symphony in 1930.
Who is William Grant Still?
What was the Cold War?
This artistic medium has the largest audience for modern classical music.
What are movie soundtracks?
This composer has collaborated with Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas on many successful film scores.
Who is John Williams?
This pioneer of the Romantic style was one of the first to use melody to represent character in music.
Who was Beethoven?
Leonard Bernstein was an overnight celebrity due to a last-minute replacement gig doing this for the New York Philharmonic in 1944.
What is conducting?
This massive legislation, as an attempt to recover from the Great Depression, employed many musicians and artists in the Works Progress Administration.
What is The New Deal?
In the early 2000s, this global event drastically damaged the financial positions of many American orchestras.
What was the 2008 Great Recession?
These two categories of film music refer to music heard or performed by character in the film, or background music - respectively.
What is diagetic/source music and nondiagetic music/scoring?
Arnold Shoenberg invented this type of music theory and composition.
What is twelve-tone method/theory?
George Gershwin's most famous composition includes this piece, used by United Airlines as their theme song.
What is Rhapsody in Blue?
This composer spent his entire education and career within the Soviet system.
Who was Dmitri Shostakovich?
Services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Band Camp are examples of this technology that has drastically changed the distribution of music in the 21st century.
What is online streaming?
These types of films were immensely popular during the Great Depression due to the high talent level and relatively inexpensive ticket prices.
What are movie musicals?
This composer was a child prodigy who was paraded around Europe by his father and studied by experts.
Who was Mozart?
An outsider due to his homosexuality, Jewish faith, and leftist politics, this American composer was the most important of his generation.
Who was Aaron Copland?
A realistic style that portrays socialism in a positive light, showing signs of progress for people under Soviet state and celebrating revolutionary ideology and heroes.
What is socialist realism?
These two instruments are used to represent the composer and her brother in blue cathedrals.
What is the flute and clarinet?
These types of scores were fully part of the dramatic action on screen, like music in an opera.
What are fully integrated film scores?
The genre of which Haydn was nicknamed "the father", even though he was not the first to write these types of pieces.
What is the symphony?
Leonard Bernstein combined these three styles in his music for West Side Story (1957)?
What are jazz, Afro-Cuban Dance, and Tin Pan Alley melodic formulas?
In the 1920s, this movement opposed the emotional intensity of late romantics and expressionism of modern composers in Germany and promoted the use of familiar elements in music.
What is New Objectivity?
This living composer blends minimalist techniques with other approaches, embracing elements from popular and classical music.
Who is John Adams?
In film, this type of music is frequently used for psychologically upsetting events, the strange or supernatural, and/or space aliens.
What is electronic music?
Prof. Harper plays this instrument in the Olympia Symphony.
What is the oboe?