Answer the following about extremely long minimalist pieces of music, for 10 points each.
[10h] This minimalist composer’s second string quartet lasts six hours. He also wrote the opera Neither with Samuel Beckett, and a choral piece to be performed in its title location, Rothko Chapel.
ANSWER: Morton Feldman
[10m] 13.6 of what unit is the energy needed to ionize a hydrogen atom? A hartree is equal to 27.2 of this unit.
ANSWER: electronvolt [or electron volts; or eV; reject “electron” or “volt”]
[10m] Clocking in at 8.5 hours is Max Richter’s album Sleep, which he structured to reflect this piece. Glenn Gould is known for his 1955 and 1981 recordings of this piece, the latter of which he performed at a much slower tempo.
ANSWER: Goldberg Variations [or Goldberg-Variationen; accept BWV 988] (by J. S. Bach)
[10e] The ionization energy of hydrogen being equal to 13.6 electronvolts is determined using this Danish physicist’s model of the atom, which puts electrons in discrete orbitals.
ANSWER: Niels Bohr
[10e] Putting the length of Feldman’s String Quartet II and Richter’s Sleep to shame, a performance of this composer’s organ piece As Slow as Possible is set to complete in 2640. This composer also wrote the decidedly shorter 4’33” (“four minutes and thirty-three seconds”).
ANSWER: John Cage [or John Milton Cage, Jr.]
[10h] The hydrogen atom’s radial eigenfunctions are this set of orthogonal polynomials named for a Frenchman. They are solutions of the equation [read slowly] “x times y-double-prime, plus one-minus-x times y-prime, plus ny equals zero.”
ANSWER: Laguerre polynomials
<Classical Music>