Music quiz

John Parks has thrown down the gauntlet. I accept his challenge and present my answers to Soho the Dog's latest music quiz. Please forgive my multiple answers to some of the questions. It is sometimes difficult to choose just one.

1. What's the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?
For folk songs in classical works....
"Frère Jacques" in Mahler 1 is pretty wonderful. That's hard to remember after the 378th time you've heard the piece, but think back to when you were just a wee lad or lass. Wasn't it great?

Petrushka has a number of quotes, but, if remember correctly from when I looked it up back in 1988, the name of the song in the 1st Tableau is "She Had a Wooden Leg". It's very cool how it is worked in and out of the "crowd music".

With other classical works being quoted, let's go with...
Shostakovich's 15th Symphony. Rossini in the first movement, Wagner in the last, and a lot of others floating around (or at least close calls with others).

2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.
The Juliet Letters by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. Sure, you can go on and on about how it's derivative (what isn't?) or simplistic, or you may describe it (as one reviewer did) as "Post-Eleanor Rigby Schubert". That's your loss. Oh, and if you try to tell me that Elvis Costello isn't one of our greatest singers, songwriters, musicians, interpreter of songs, etc....well, it's pistols at sunrise!

3. Great piece with a terrible title.
As a percussionist, I deal with these every day. Too many to name.

4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?
Benjamin Britten.

5. Who's your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)
Well, the right thing to say here would be Clara Schumann. Then I would go on and on about how under appreciated she was/is and how, in another place and time, she would be recognized as the great she truly was. Or, I could jump on the new train leaving the station which is trying to do the same for Anna Magdalena. (Did she write those cello suites????)

All well deserved, but, I'll mix things up a little bit and answer Luciano Berio, husband of Cathy Berberian (for a while at least).

6. Terrible piece with a great title.
I plead the Fifth. I'll take John's approach. Great piece with a great title?....Banana Dumptruck by Steven Mackey.

7. What's the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?
From the opening, where F. Murray Abraham describes the single oboe note hanging in air (frorm the Gran Partita) to the "Requiem Montage" at the end, the use of many of Mozart's warhorses (if you can call them that) is spectacularly done in Amadeus.

But, really, can you beat the exhilaration you feel while watching Die Hard? The "Ode to Joy" never fails!

8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.
Kiri Sings Gershwin is the sentimental favorite for this question, but lets not forget Michael Bolton's opera arias

9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?
Marvin Gaye. "Mercy, Mercy Me" would win this for him, even if he never recorded another thing. Luckily, he did.
Nothing against Sam Cooke, though. He's great, too.

10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Vincent Van Gogh, Martha Graham

I'll skip the extra credit.

These questions (and a great music blog) can be found at http://sohothedog.blogspot.com