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Program music
Instrumental musical rendition of a narrative

Program music is a form of instrumental music that aims to musically depict an extramusical narrative or scene, such as Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which illustrates a countryside visit with elements like a thunderstorm portrayed through timpani and piccolo sounds. Unlike opera, oratorio, or lieder, program music conveys its story through instrumental means rather than sung lyrics. Often accompanied by explanatory text, examples include Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and the sonnets linked to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Flourishing especially during the Romantic period, program music sometimes takes the form of symphonic poems, contrasting with absolute music, which is non-programmatic.

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History

16th and 17th centuries

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."[This quote needs a citation]

18th century

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".[This quote needs a citation] 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.

19th century

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".[1]. 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, the main subject being an actress with whom he was in love at the time. Franz Liszt did provide 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. His symphonic poems include Death and Transfiguration (portraying a dying man and his entry into heaven), Don Juan (based on the ancient legend of Don Juan), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (based on episodes in the career of the legendary German figure Till Eulenspiegel), Don Quixote (portraying episodes in the life of Miguel de Cervantes' character, Don Quixote), A Hero's Life (which depicts episodes in the life of an unnamed hero often taken to be Strauss himself) and Symphonia Domestica (which portrays episodes in the composer's own married life, including putting the baby to bed). Strauss is reported to have said that music can describe anything, even a teaspoon.1

Another composer of programmatic music was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose colorful "musical pictures" include "Sadko", Op. 5, after the Russian Bylina, about the minstrel who sings to the Tsar of the Sea, the famous "'Scheherazade", Op. 35, after the Arabian Nights entertainments (where the heroine is depicted by a violin and whose stories include "Sinbad the Sailor") and any number of orchestral suites from his operas, including The Tale of Tsar Saltan (which also contains "Flight of the Bumblebee"), The Golden Cockerel, Christmas Eve, The Snow Maiden, and The Legend of The Invisible City of Kitezh.

In Scandinavia, Sibelius explored the Kalevala legend in several tone poems, most famously in The Swan of Tuonela.

One of the most famous programs, because it has never been definitively identified, is the secret non-musical idea or theme – the "Enigma" – that underlies Edward Elgar's Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) of 1899. The composer disclosed it to certain friends, but at his request they never made it public.

20th century

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.

Representational music vs. program music

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, as well as between "imitation" and "representation. Finally, there is the question of whether a deliberate expressive character is sufficient to rank as a "program".2

Ballet, incidental music, and film

Music that is composed to accompany a ballet could be considered program music, even when presented separately as a concert piece; many of the classic works of the ballet repertoire have a plot, which the music serves to illustrate. A similar case is incidental music to stage plays, such as Mendelssohn's incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Some film scores could be considered program music. Influenced by the late Romantic work of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Ottorino Respighi, Richard Strauss, and others, motion picture soundtrack composers took up the banner of programmatic music following the advent of "talkies". Some film scores, such as Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky, have found a place in the classical concert repertoire.

Programmatic music and abstract imagery

A good deal of program music falls in between the realm of purely programmatic and purely absolute, with titles that clearly suggest an extramusical association, but no detailed story that can be followed and no musical passages that can be unequivocally identified with specific images. Examples would include Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, From the New World or Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica.

See also

Sources

Further reading

References

  1. Gifford 2012. - Gifford, Katya (2012). "Richard Strauss: Biography". HumanitiesWeb.org. Retrieved 28 April 2021. http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=c&p=c&a=b&ID=60 ↩

  2. Scruton 2001. - Scruton, Roger (2001). "Programme music". Grove Music Online. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22394. https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fgmo%2F9781561592630.article.22394 ↩