1 According to this lesson, the subject matter of music is
Correct. A painting of a sad woman shows you sadness; music enacts the structure of sadness in sound.
The lesson argues that music bypasses representation and presents patterns of feeling directly.
2 What is the difference between consonance and dissonance?
Correct. Dissonance creates tension that the music may later resolve; that tension and release is part of musical feeling.
Consonance sounds stable and pleasing; dissonance sounds tense and unresolved.
3 In Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the four-note opening is best called
Correct. Beethoven transforms, inverts, extends, and develops this motive obsessively across the first movement.
The short-short-short-long figure is the smallest self-contained unit that the movement is built from. That is a motive.
4 What claim do formalists make about music?
Correct. A formalist hears the Fifth as a masterpiece of structural logic.
Formalists focus on form: the relationships among tones, rhythms, and harmonies, not on external meanings.
5 What claim do expressionists make about music?
Correct. An expressionist hears the Fifth as an embodiment of struggle and triumph. The lesson says both views are right, and neither is complete without the other.
Expressionists emphasize what music expresses. A minor key sounds sad because it connects to our experience of sadness.
6 How does Billie Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit" make a devastating subject harder to ignore?
Correct. The artistic form does not soften the subject matter; it makes it harder to look away.
Think about contrast. A quiet, beautiful voice describing something terrible forces the listener to attend to the words.
7 What is a raga in Indian classical music?
Correct. The raga provides the rules, and the performer's spontaneous choices within those rules create the content.
A raga is not a single melody. It is a set of rules and associations that the performer improvises within.
8 A piece that opens with a theme, moves to a contrasting section, and then returns to the opening theme is in
Correct. The return in ABA gives a feeling of homecoming after the contrast.
A return to the opening after a contrast makes an A-B-A pattern, called ternary form.
9 Bach's Prelude from his first cello suite is built from
Correct. The pattern outlines changing harmonies, and the listener hears a slow harmonic journey inside the quick motion.
The piece is famous for a pattern that outlines chords one note at a time on a single cello.
10 On the first pass of the three-pass method of listening, you should
Correct. The second pass is for elements such as tempo, rhythm, melody, and dynamics, and the third is for expression and the choices that produce it.
The first pass is for the big picture. Details come on later passes.