Music Theory & Terminology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the small segment of music between two vertical lines drawn down the staff, each one holding the number of beats fixed by the time signature?

Question 2

What is the name for the device of taking a short melodic or harmonic pattern and then immediately repeating it once or twice more, each time starting a step higher or a step lower?

Question 3

What is the name for music that deliberately avoids any home key or central note, treating all twelve pitches as equal in importance so that no chord feels like a point of rest?

Question 4

What is the name for the pair of numbers stacked like a fraction at the start of a piece, the upper telling how many beats fill each bar and the lower telling which kind of note counts as one beat?

Question 5

What is the name for the interval spanning seven semitones, for example C up to G, the most stable and open-sounding interval after the octave, and the one on which the tuning of string instruments and the circle of fifths are based?

Question 6

What is the name, from the Italian for robbed, for the expressive practice of pushing and pulling the tempo, hurrying some notes and holding others back, so that the printed rhythm is bent for feeling while the broad pulse survives?

Question 7

What is the name, in American usage, for the longest note value in common use, drawn as a hollow oval with no stem, and lasting, in common time, for a full bar of four beats?

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About Music Theory & Terminology

Music theory is the toolkit for reading, writing and talking about how music is put together, and this quiz covers its vocabulary in eighty questions. Each describes a piece of notation, a pitch idea, an interval, a chord, a rhythm term, a dynamic, an ornament or a formal device, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains it in plain language.

The first pack is the groundwork: the staff and the clefs, middle C, the key and time signatures, the bar, the sharps and flats; the semitone, the major and minor scales, the interval and the triad, the tonic and the beat; note values, rests and the dot; the singing syllables of solfege; and the Italian tempo words.

The second pack goes further. The chromatic, pentatonic and whole-tone scales and the church modes; relative keys and enharmonic notes; the perfect fifth, the third, consonance and interval inversion; the cadence, the dominant seventh, the circle of fifths, modulation, figured bass, the arpeggio and Roman numeral analysis; syncopation, the triplet, compound time, polyrhythm, the anacrusis and rubato; dynamics, crescendo, staccato, the fermata, ritardando, the tie and the trill; the appoggiatura; the textures of monophony and its relatives; the ostinato; binary form, theme and variations, the coda, da capo and call and response.

The third pack is the deeper end: atonality, the Pythagorean comma, the pedal point, Sprechstimme, the hemiola, augmentation, sight-reading, the lead sheet, the old idea of key characteristics, the Picardy third, the primary triads, the diminished seventh chord, word painting, through-composed form, the medieval teacher Guido of Arezzo, the suspension, the Neapolitan sixth, the Afro-Cuban clave, modal mixture and the false relation.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a scale beside scales, an interval beside intervals, an ornament beside ornaments, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Nothing here assumes you can already read music: every term is defined in plain words where it appears, and the quiz doubles as a short course in the language.

Images are used only where they genuinely cannot give the answer away. Because a picture of a clef or a specific symbol would simply be the answer, the only photos used are a plain page of standard notation or a piano keyboard, and each appears only on a question whose four options are all the same sort of term, so that the picture fits every one of them equally and predicts none. A few points of common confusion are cleared up along the way, such as the difference between a tie and a slur, between an appoggiatura and an acciaccatura, and between the relative and the parallel minor.