Music Words
Match music vocabulary to its meaning in a free timed browser game. Tempo, crescendo, staccato, key signature and more.
MusicFamous Composers
A composer is remembered by a few pieces. Below: the shortest path from a name in the concert hall to the piece everyone knows.
Choose your difficulty
Pick a level to start playing. You can switch at any time.
How to play
Read the composer, then tap their best-known work.
Tip: your progress and best score are saved in this browser only.
Related games
Major Scales
Count the sharps and flats in a major key signature in a free timed music game. From 0 accidentals to 7.
MusicCount the Semitones
Work out how many semitones separate two notes in a free timed music game. From a semitone up to a seventh.
MusicWhat you are actually practicing
A composer's name is a label for a handful of pieces, and those pieces are what listeners actually recognise. This set pairs the names that appear on concert posters with the one work each is most reliably known for.
There is a second skill hiding underneath: learning to place a composer in a period. Once you know Vivaldi belongs to the Baroque and Debussy to the impressionist era, a new name arrives with a set of likely companions instead of a blank space.
How the game works
You are shown a composer and four pieces. Tap the work that belongs to them. A wrong pick reveals the answer immediately.
Easy covers the eight names with the strongest single-work associations. Medium widens the pool. Hard uses the full list, including composers known more for a genre or a movement than for one famous tune.
The links worth knowing
Baroque: Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Brandenburg Concertos; Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons; Handel wrote Messiah; Haydn wrote The Creation; Mozart bridges into the classical period and wrote The Magic Flute.
Classical and early romantic: Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony and the Moonlight Sonata; Schubert wrote the Unfinished Symphony; Brahms wrote the German Requiem and the Lullaby; Chopin wrote the Nocturnes and the Ballades.
Later and national schools: Tchaikovsky wrote The Nutcracker Suite and the 1812 Overture; Wagner wrote The Ring Cycle; Verdi wrote Aida; Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville; Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring; Ravel wrote Bolero; Mahler wrote Symphony No. 5; Debussy wrote Clair de Lune; Satie wrote the Gymnopedies; Copland wrote Fanfare for the Common Man; Joplin wrote The Entertainer.
How to get faster
Anchor each name to a place and a year. "Vivaldi, Venice, around 1720" is far more useful than trying to hold a melody in your head, because the context tells you which period you are in and therefore which other names belong alongside him.
A note on the harder entries
A few of these are famous for something other than a single piece. The Ring Cycle is a sequence of four music dramas rather than one work, the Gymnopedies are a set of three, and the Well-Tempered Clavier is two books of twenty-four preludes and fugues each. Knowing the shape of the work is part of knowing the composer.