programme music

The tradition & historical record

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative or description of some aspect of the world. The term was invented in the 19th century by Franz Liszt, who himself composed a great deal of program music. However, as Liszt himself noted, program music had been written for centuries before his time. To give an example, Ludwig van Beethoven's Sixth Symphony narrates a visit to the countryside, portraying in succession a happy arrival, a quiet moment by a brook, an encounter with dancing peasants, a thunderstorm, and the peasants' song of thankgiving when the storm is over. Program music is often written so that the notes themselves convey, at least to some degree, the meaning of what is portrayed; thus the thunderstorm in Beethoven's symphony includes loud timpani strokes to convey the thunder and shrill piccolo music to depict the shrieking winds. Sung music, such as opera, oratorio, or lieder is not considered program music as such, even when a story is told, since the story is given directly in the lyrics and not the music itself. Often, program music is accompanied by written material that clarifies the program for listeners. Beethoven's program is given in the subtitles he gave to the movements in the musical score, along with a few notations identifying the bird calls. ¹

Composers of the Renaissance wrote a fair amount of program music, especially for the harpsichord, including works such as Martin Peerson's The Fall of the Leafe and William Byrd's The Battell. For the latter work, the composer provided this written description of the sections: "Souldiers sommons, marche of footemen, marche of horsmen, trumpetts, Irishe marche, bagpipe and the drone, flute and the droome, marche to the fighte, the battels be joyned, retreat, galliarde for the victorie." ¹

In the Baroque era, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons has poetic inscriptions in the score referring to each of the seasons, evoking spring, summer, autumn, and winter. An example of program music by J. S. Bach is his Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992. Program music was perhaps less often composed in the Classical era. At that time, perhaps more than any other, music achieved drama from its own internal resources, notably in works written in sonata form. Some of Joseph Haydn's earlier symphonies may be program music for which the program is lost; for example, the composer once said that one of his earlier symphonies represents "a dialogue between God and the Sinner". It is not known which of his symphonies Haydn was referring to. His Symphony No. 8 also includes a movement named "La tempesta" that represents a storm. A minor Classical-era composer, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, wrote a series of programmatic symphonies based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. German composer Justin Heinrich Knecht's Le portrait musical de la nature, ou Grande sinfonie (Musical Portrait of Nature or Grand Symphony) from 1784–1785 is another 18th century example, anticipating Beethoven's Sixth Symphony by twenty years. ¹

Program music particularly flourished in the Romantic era. Ludwig van Beethoven felt a certain reluctance in writing program music, and said of his 1808 Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) that the "whole work can be perceived without description – it is more an expression of feelings rather than tone-painting".. Yet the work clearly contains depictions of bird calls, a flowing brook, a storm, and so on. Beethoven later returned to program music with his Piano Sonata Op. 81a, Les Adieux, which depicts the departure and return of his friend and patron the Archduke Rudolf. Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was a musical narration of a hyperbolically emotional love story, whose real-life basis was the composer's intense passion for the actress Harriet Smithson. Franz Liszt provided explicit programs for many of his piano pieces and he was also the inventor of the term symphonic poem. In 1874, Modest Mussorgsky composed for piano a series of pieces describing seeing a gallery of ten of his friend's paintings and drawings in his Pictures at an Exhibition, later orchestrated by many composers including Maurice Ravel. The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote many short pieces of program music which he called Tone Poems. His most famous are probably the Danse macabre and several movements from the Carnival of the Animals. The composer Paul Dukas is perhaps best known for his tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, based on a tale from Goethe. Possibly the most adept at musical depiction in his program music was German composer Richard Strauss. ¹

During the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, the increased influence of modernism and other anti-Romantic trends contributed to a decline in esteem for program music, but audiences continued to enjoy such pieces as Arthur Honegger's depiction of a steam locomotive in Pacific 231 (1923). Indeed, Percy Grainger's incomplete orchestral fragment Train Music employs the same function. This music for large orchestra depicts a train moving in the mountains of Italy. Heitor Villa-Lobos similarly depicted a rural steam-driven train in The Little Train of the Caipira (1930). Indeed, an entire genre sprang up in the 1920s, particularly in the Soviet Union, of picturesque music depicting machines and factories. Well-known examples include Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry (1926–27) and Sergei Prokofiev's Le Pas d'acier (The Steel Step, 1926). An example from outside of the Soviet Union is George Antheil's Ballet mécanique (1923–24). Ottorino Respighi composed a number of tone poems in the 1910s and 1920s, notably three works on different aspects of the city of Rome. Gustav Holst's The Planets is another well-known example, as is Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead. Although written originally for the film Dangerous Moonlight, British composer Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto was one of the first pieces of orchestral music composed for a film to achieve popularity in concert halls as well. ¹

Heinrich Ignaz Biber's Sonata representativa (for violin and continuo), which depicts various animals (the nightingale, the cuckoo, the cat) in a humoristic manner. This is perhaps program music but perhaps instead illustrates a distinction between "representational" music and program music properly speaking, It is possible for music to depict particular things or events, sometimes quite briefly, without actually having a program. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Program music”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

programme music is type of art music that attempts to musically render an extra-musical narrative, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 26 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²