Musical Instruments
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This musical instrument quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the whole orchestra and a good deal beyond it. You will meet the harpsichord maker who invented the piano, the Belgian who gave his name to the saxophone, the Russian physicist whose instrument is played without being touched, and the termites that hollow out didgeridoos. There are questions on how instruments are built, where they came from, who made them famous and the odd records they hold, from a 33,000-pipe organ in Atlantic City to a violin that sold for $15.9 million. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a school music class or family game night: how many keys on a piano, which family the flute belongs to, what a bagpipe's bag was traditionally made from. The rest climb through jazz, folk and world instruments to details only a working musician or a serious trivia player will know. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and the citation sits under each explanation, so you can settle the argument about whether a saxophone is a woodwind once and for all.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many keys does a standard modern piano have?
88
88 keys, 52 white and 36 black. Early pianos had far fewer; makers kept widening the keyboard because composers asked for more range.
Q 02Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano around 1700 while employed by the Medici as what?
Keeper of the Instruments
Cristofori was Keeper of the Instruments for Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence; his hammers struck the strings and fell back, letting the player control volume as a harpsichord could not.
Q 03Which piano maker's Imperial model has 97 keys instead of the usual number?
Bösendorfer
Bösendorfer built the Imperial after pianist Ferruccio Busoni asked for extra bass notes to do justice to Bach's organ works; its 97 keys span a full eight octaves.
Q 04The saxophone has a metal body, yet it belongs to which family of instruments?
Woodwind
Woodwind: the sound comes from a single reed on the mouthpiece, and that, not the metal, decides the family. Adolphe Sax patented it in 1846, hoping to join woodwind agility to brass power.
Q 05Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone in France in 1846, but he came from which other country?
Belgium
Belgium: Sax was born in Dinant in 1814 and is said to have survived so many childhood accidents that neighbours called him 'little Sax, the ghost'. He moved to France in 1842.
Q 06The four strings of a violin are tuned in which interval?
Perfect fifths
Perfect fifths: G, D, A and E from low to high. A violinist tunes the A string first, then sets the others from it by ear, a fifth at a time.
Q 07The 'Lady Blunt' violin, which fetched a then-record $15.9 million in 2011, was made by which craftsman?
Antonio Stradivari
Antonio Stradivari made it in 1721. It is named for Lady Anne Blunt, Lord Byron's granddaughter, and its owners sold it to raise money for victims of Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Q 08The Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari families all built their violins in which Italian city?
Cremona
Cremona: Andrea Amati is credited with giving the violin its modern form there in the 1500s, and makers still build by hand in the city, so UNESCO put its violin craftsmanship on the intangible heritage list in 2012.
Q 09The theremin, an early electronic instrument, is unusual because it is played how?
Without touching it
Without touching it: the player's hands move near two antennas. Leon Theremin found the effect by accident, when a device he built to measure gases changed pitch as his hand came closer.
Q 10Which instrument plays the eerie, swooping high line on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'?
An Electro-Theremin
An Electro-Theremin, which trombonist Paul Tanner devised with inventor Bob Whitsell because a true theremin was so hard to pitch: a slider along a marked strip finds the notes.
Q 11Traditional didgeridoos are made from eucalyptus branches that have been hollowed out by what?
Termites
Termites hollow out the trunk by eating the dead heartwood and leaving the living sapwood; makers tap trunks to find ones already eaten through.
Q 12The Hawaiian word 'ukulele' roughly translates as what?
Jumping flea
'Ukulele is usually glossed as 'jumping flea', from 'uku (flea) and lele (to jump), said to describe the player's quick, darting fingers.
Q 13The ukulele descends from small guitar-like instruments brought to Hawaii by immigrants from where?
Portugal
Portugal: cabinet makers from Madeira landed in Honolulu on the Ravenscrag in 1879 and built small guitars like those of home. King Kalākaua played the new instrument for his guests, and it caught on.
Q 21The pipe organ with the most pipes in the world, 33,112, stands in a boardwalk hall in which New Jersey resort?
Atlantic City
Atlantic City: state senator Emerson Richards designed the Boardwalk Hall organ to fill the vast arena without amplification. It has not worked fully since the great Atlantic hurricane of 1944.
Q 22The earliest known organ, built by Ctesibius in the 3rd century BC, used what to keep its wind steady?
Water pressure
Water pressure: pumps pushed air into a chamber standing in water, and the water's weight evened out the wind. The Greeks named it the hydraulis, from their words for water and pipe.
Q 23In Hornbostel-Sachs classification, an instrument whose own body vibrates, like a triangle, is called what?
Q 14Which Roman emperor, by Suetonius's account, vowed to perform in public on an early bagpipe?
Nero
Nero: Suetonius says that late in his reign he vowed to celebrate a victory by performing on the bagpipes. A Greek writer of his day also describes a ruler, perhaps Nero, playing a pipe with a bag under his arm.
Q 15Which instrument gives the orchestra its tuning note, a concert A?
Oboe
Oboe: its bright, penetrating tone is easy to hear across the orchestra. Another reason often given is that its pitch is hard to adjust on the day, so everyone else matches it.
Q 16The oldest known musical instruments, found in caves in Germany, are flutes made from what?
Vulture bone and mammoth ivory
Vulture bone and mammoth ivory: the best-preserved, from Hohle Fels cave, is a vulture's wing bone with five finger holes, at least 35,000 years old, a sign that music reached Europe with the first modern humans.
Q 17Which Fender guitar, launched in 1954 with three pickups, did Jimi Hendrix play at Woodstock?
Stratocaster
The Stratocaster. Leo Fender, the radio repairman whose firm made it, was no guitarist himself; its body was contoured so it would sit comfortably against the player.
Q 18The modern classical guitar's shape was settled around 1850 by makers from which country?
Spain
Antonio de Torres Jurado, working in Seville and later Almería in Spain, fixed the larger body and fan-braced top that every classical guitar since has copied.
Q 19What tune did Gemini 6's Wally Schirra play on a harmonica during the December 1965 mission?
Jingle Bells
Jingle Bells: the crew first radioed that they had spotted a strange satellite about to re-enter. Then Schirra played a tiny harmonica while Tom Stafford shook small bells; both are now at the Smithsonian.
Q 20Which harmonica maker was founded in the town of Trossingen in 1857 by a trained clockmaker?
Hohner
Hohner: Matthias Hohner trained as a clockmaker before turning to harmonicas in 1857. From the 1860s he shipped them to America, which was his biggest market for decades.
Idiophone
Idiophone joins the Greek idios, 'own', to the word for sound. Hornbostel and Sachs coined it to replace the older 'autophone', which they feared would suggest instruments that play themselves.
Q 24Hornbostel and Sachs credited their instrument numbering to which library system?
Dewey Decimal
Dewey Decimal: in their 1914 scheme each added digit narrows the class, so the violin and the guitar share the number 321.322, which marks a lute with a box body and a neck.
Q 25George Harrison first played a sitar on which Beatles song?
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown): Harrison had discovered the sitar on the set of the film Help! earlier in 1965 and bought a cheap one from a shop on London's Oxford Street.
Q 26A sitar's extra strings that run beneath the frets and hum along with the melody are known as what?
Sympathetic strings
Sympathetic strings: a sitar has up to 13, tuned to the notes of the raga, and each rings by resonance whenever a played string sounds its pitch.
Q 27How does a trumpet player produce the sound?
Vibrating the lips in the mouthpiece
Vibrating the lips in the mouthpiece: the buzz is where the sound begins, so the cup that receives it matters. A deep cup gives a mellower, darker tone and a shallow one a brighter tone.
Q 28The international society for players of the 'French horn' recommends which name for the instrument?
The horn
The horn: every issue of the society's journal says HORN is the correct English name. The instrument in modern orchestras is in any case the German design, not the French one with piston valves.
Q 29The Italian word 'violoncello', shortened to cello, literally means what?
Little violone
Little violone: a violone is itself a 'big viola', so the full word stacks a big ending and a little ending on viola, which makes the cello, literally, a small large viola.
Q 30The double bass differs from the rest of the orchestral string family in being tuned in which interval?
Fourths
Fourths: the tuning is a legacy of the viol, the older family the double bass is often traced to, while the violin, viola and cello are tuned in fifths. A bass guitar's E, A, D, G strings copy it.