All entries for Tuesday 12 October 2004

Today's Quiz… No 2

Answers to yesterday's quiz: 1. Philip Larkin (see this); 2. (a) Anthony Eden (see this); (b) Richard Crossman (see this); 3. Germaine Greer (see this); 4. Piers Gaveston (see this); 5. J J Scarisbrick (see this and this).

Students and intellectuals are regularly accused of knowing nothing about serious (classical, or pre-rock) music. It is reported that most of Britain's children cannot name a single classical composer; in 2003 James MacMillan wrote in the Guardian:

There is a startling ignorance about music among contemporary intellectuals who value the latest literary and philosophical thinking... Gradually music has become more and more marginal to intellectual endeavour... Music is no longer an essential aspect of any self-respecting person's education. The widely perceived impoverishment and philistinism in our culture may not be unconnected with this musical decay.

So, let's try a little litmus test... Can you match the composers on the left with the cities on the right? The cities represent the most important part of the title, name or sub-title of a well known work by each of the composers. There's nothing obscure about any of them, no tricks. It's like matching Orwell and "The Road to Wigan Pier" or Shakespeare and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" (you don't need to have read them to do it). If you can match cities and composers, see if you can identify the kind of work involved, and what makes it musically interesting...

COMPOSERS	CITIES
Bizet	Florence
Britten	Leningrad
Haydn	London
Mozart	Nurenberg
Respighi	Oxford
Rossini	Paris
Schoenberg	Perth
Shostakovich	Rome
Tchaikovsky	Seville
Vaughan-Williams	Venice
Wagner	Warsaw

Charles Bourne : 12 Oct 2004 11:43 |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem