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The same questions as the quiz, right answer highlighted and the fact under it. Print the page for a quiz night: the print layout keeps the questions and answers only. The Music and Art topic in Lock&Learn holds 131 facts in all.
What happened when the crowd erupted after Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premiered?
Beethoven never heard his own standing ovation. By 1824 Beethoven was completely deaf, so when the audience at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony burst into thunderous applause, he kept facing the orchestra, unaware. A singer had to gently turn him around so he could finally see the ovation he could never hear.
Source: Britannica
What musical instrument is played by waving your hands through thin air?
This instrument is played without ever touching it. The theremin, invented by Russian physicist Leon Theremin around 1920, is controlled entirely by moving your hands near two metal antennas: one shapes the pitch, the other the volume. He patented it in the United States in 1928, and it remains one of the only instruments ever played with no physical contact at all.
Source: Wikipedia
What do you do when an injury ends your violin career at a conservatory you joined at age four?
A violin prodigy became the greatest hands-free musician ever. Clara Rockmore trained as a violin prodigy at the St. Petersburg Conservatory before tendinitis forced her to give it up. She then turned to the newly invented theremin, using her violinist's precision to become its first great virtuosa.
Source: Wikipedia
Which pop album has never been dethroned as the best-selling of all time?
One album still outsells every other record ever made. Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982, is officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the best-selling album in history, with estimated sales exceeding 67 million copies worldwide. It also topped the US album chart for 37 non-consecutive weeks.
Source: Guinness World Records
How long can one person keep a solo concert going?
One musician performed solo for nearly three weeks straight. Musician Kuzhalmannam Ramakrishnan of India set the record for the longest performance by a solo artist, playing continuously for 501 hours in July 2009. That works out to almost 21 straight days on stage.
Source: Guinness World Records
How young was Mozart when he composed his first full symphony?
He wrote his first symphony before most kids finish third grade. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was composing simple music by age five and had already written his first symphony by age eight, during a European concert tour with his family. He went on to compose more than 600 works in his lifetime.
Source: Wikipedia
What happens when violinists are blindfolded and asked to pick the priceless antique instrument?
Experts often can't tell a $16 million violin from a modern one. Stradivarius violins, hand-built by Antonio Stradivari in the 1600s and 1700s, are famous for selling for millions of dollars, with the 'Lady Blunt' fetching $15.9 million. Yet blind listening tests conducted since the 19th century have repeatedly found no significant difference in sound quality compared to top modern violins.
Source: Wikipedia
What is the earliest instrument humans are known to have played?
The oldest known musical instrument is a vulture-bone flute. A flute carved from a griffon vulture's wing bone, found in Germany's Hohle Fels cave, dates back around 40,000 years and is considered the oldest recognizable musical instrument ever discovered. It has five finger holes and was made during the Aurignacian period.
Source: National Geographic
What did the audience actually hear during John Cage's most famous composition?
A composer once wrote a piece with no notes at all. John Cage's 1952 piece '4′33″' instructs performers to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds across three silent movements marked only 'tacet.' The real music, Cage argued, was the ambient coughs, shifting seats, and outside noise the audience heard instead.
Source: Wikipedia
How long can one single track possibly be?
The longest officially released song runs almost six days straight. The longest officially released song is 138 hours, 41 minutes long, recorded by Dr. Jagadeesh Pillai of India in 2023. He sang the entire 15,000-verse Hindu epic poem 'Shri Ram Charit Manas' in one continuous track that took over four years to record and edit.
Source: Guinness World Records
Where in the world would you find the largest musical instrument ever built?
The world's largest musical instrument sits in a New Jersey arena. The Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City took three years to build in the early 1930s, weighs over 150 tons, and has an official pipe count of 33,112. Guinness World Records recognizes it as both the largest and the loudest musical instrument ever constructed.
Source: Wikipedia
What's missing from Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' that almost every hit song has?
This six-minute rock classic doesn't have a single chorus. Freddie Mercury's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' has no traditional chorus, instead moving through a ballad, an operatic section reportedly built from around 180 overdubbed vocal parts, and a hard rock finale. Despite radio executives doubting it, the song topped the UK charts for nine weeks.
Source: Wikipedia
What melody, sung at nearly every party, holds a Guinness World Record for recognition?
This tune is the most recognized song in the English language. 'Happy Birthday to You' was named the most recognized song in the English language by the 1998 Guinness World Records, ahead of 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.' Its simple melody has been translated into at least 18 languages worldwide.
Source: Wikipedia
What part of the bagpipes plays no melody at all, just one constant tone?
One pipe on a bagpipe never stops humming the same note. Bagpipes get their droning sound from at least one 'drone' pipe, which is unfingered and sounds a single continuous note, usually pitched two octaves below the tonic of the melody-playing chanter. The chanter's name even comes from the Latin 'cantare,' meaning 'to sing.'
Source: Wikipedia
How long does it take to sit through Wagner's entire 'Ring' saga?
One opera cycle takes about 15 hours to perform in full. Richard Wagner's four-opera epic 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' is normally staged across four separate nights, with a total playing time of roughly 15 hours. Wagner spent about 26 years writing its music and libretto, from 1848 to 1874.
Source: Wikipedia
What problem was the piano originally built to solve?
The piano was invented to fix one flaw in the harpsichord. Around 1709, Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first piano because the harpsichord could not vary its volume no matter how hard a key was struck. He called his invention 'gravicembalo col piano e forte,' or 'harpsichord that plays soft and loud.'
Source: Britannica
Which band still holds the record for the most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100?
No act has topped the US singles chart more times than this band. The Beatles have scored 20 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, the most of any act in the chart's history. They overtook Elvis Presley for the record back in 1965 and have never been caught since.
Source: Wikipedia
What chart feat did the Beatles pull off in April 1964 that stood unmatched for 57 years?
The Beatles once held all five of the country's top songs at once. In April 1964, the Beatles held the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, with 'Can't Buy Me Love' at number one. No other act matched the feat until Drake finally did it in 2021.
Source: Wikipedia
Which country's national anthem can be sung from start to finish in under a minute?
The world's shortest national anthem lasts about 50 seconds. Japan's national anthem, 'Kimigayo,' is sung in just 11 measures, taking around 50 seconds and using only 32 characters of lyrics drawn from a poem written over a thousand years ago. It is both the shortest and one of the oldest national anthem lyrics in the world.
Source: Wikipedia
What physical trait let Rachmaninoff write chords most pianists still can't play?
A composer's giant hands changed what piano music could sound like. Sergei Rachmaninoff could reportedly stretch his hand across 12 piano keys, spanning what musicians call a thirteenth, compared to the average pianist's reach of about nine white keys. That extraordinary span let him compose huge chords and leaps that remain a challenge for performers today.
Source: National Institutes of Health (PMC)
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