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Interesting Questions, Facts and Information
- There are a total of 195 general entries. We are selecting 30 for display.
Special Topics
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 Interesting Questions, Facts, and Information
 Classical Music
Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Hartmann was not considered a Jew by the nazis. He went into 'Innere Emigration' or inner emingration and stayed silent for over ten years as a protest against the Nazi terror. Schoenberg actually wasn't German, but still. Weill and Korngold both wrote music for Broadway and Hollywood.
It consists of silence only. The piece 4'33' was written by John Cage and consist of three movements. The pianist stays silent and the audience is supposed to listen to the ambient sounds.
Clarinet. Only the clarinet has a single reed, the others have a double reed.
Frederic Chopin. Mozart wrote 'eine kleine Nachtmusik', but that was a divertimento, not a nocturne. The others did similar things (Crumb even wrote 'Night Music', inspired by Mozart and Chopin...
Flute. Even if they are all made of metal, the flute is considered to be one of the 'woodwind' instruments. Mainly because in the baroque orchestra, the traverso flute was indeed a wooden instrument.
Belgian. During the latter half of the 19th Century, music in Paris was almost dominated by composers and musicians from Belgium. Fetis was head of the Paris opera. Aubert has written an opera that kindled the revolutionary fire of the Belgian nation, Ysaye was a virtuoso violinist who taught Queen Elisabeth (of Belgium!). Guillaume Lekeu is probably the least well known. Wrote mainly chamber music.
Gustav Mahler. "Songs of a Sailor" is a melancholy cycle dealing with all the typical Big Questions of Life, Longing, Hope and Death.
| The poem 'Pelleas et Melisande' by Maurice Maeterlinck was put into music by many composers. Who didn't? | Very Tough Classical Music
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Cesar Franck. Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize for literature, mainly for his work 'La vie des fourmies' (Life of the Ants). Originating from Ghent (Belgium) he stayed in touch with French artistic circles.
George Antheil. Antheil was an American living in Paris in the early 20th century. He experimented with other noise producing machines as well. Eric Satie was one of his better known cronies.
New England Conservatory.
'The Rite of Spring'. 'Daphnis et Chloe' was written by Ravel, Paul Hindemith wrote 'Symphonic Metamorphosis' and Mendelssohn wrote 'Hebrides Overture'.
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. 'Night on Bare Mountain' was written by Mussourgsky, but orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, along with many other works.
Rudolph Serkin. Rudolph Serkin and his son Peter, are both famous concert pianists.
'Night on Bald Mountain'. 'Night on Bare Mountain' was written by Mussourgsky and was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov.
| The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is one of Franz Liszt's most famous works. How many other Hungarian Rhapsodies did he write? | Interesting Piano Trivia
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18. There were 19 in total.
| Saint-Saens' 'Carnival of the Animals' was written for piano and orchestra. How many individual pieces is it comprised of? | Interesting Piano Trivia
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| As a instrument maker at the court of Ferdinand de' Medici in Florence, this man began making a harpsichord that could play soft and loud. By 1700, he had completed at least one of the new keyboard instrument whose strings were activated by hammers instead of plectra. Who was this man? | Classical Music Innovations
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Bartolomeo Cristofori. Early Fortepianos were in wing-shaped outer cases patterned after Italian harpsichords. Cristofori's construction methods were sufficient for the demands made on the instrument throughout the 18th century.
| This man's reputation for teaching singers to learn new chants quickly won him an invitation from Pope John XIX to Rome to explain his method of teaching by singing syllables and his new system of using lines and spaces to designate pitch heights. Who was this man? | Classical Music Innovations
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Guido d'Arezzo. Guido developed a workable system of sight-singing by syllables, based on his setting of the poem 'Ut Queant laxis'. Guido was also the first person to recognize the value of using staff notation to designate definite pitches.
4. Brahms (1833-1897) composed only four symphonies. He wrote all his symphonies between 1876 and 1885. He was 43 years old when he composed his first symphony; at an equivalent age, Beethoven had composed eight of his nine symphonies.
Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach composed this masterful series of counterpoint variations at the suggestion of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia.
Sergei Rachmaninov. Excerpts from Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 appeared in this 1955 comedy that starred Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Rachmaninov was a Russian composer who fled the Soviet Union and eventually moved to the United States.
Piano Concerto No. 21. Piano Concerto No. 21 earned this nickname after excerpts from it were used in the 1967 film "Elvira Madigan."
Aaron Copland. Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was one of the greatest American composers of classical music.
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