Programme music

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Programme music is a piece of music for instruments which describes something or tells a story. It is the opposite of "absolute music" which is not trying to describe anything, just the sound of the piece. Programme music was very popular in the 19th century although there are examples of programme music written earlier.

Sometimes composers in the Renaissance and Baroque periods wrote music which described things like battles. Antonio Vivaldi wrote a very famous set of four concertos for violin and strings called The Four Seasons. Each of the movements describe things happening during the year's seasons, e.g. the birds singing in the spring, people skating on the ice in winter etc.

At the beginning of the 19th century Beethoven wrote a Pastoral Symphony which describes the countryside. This way of making music describe things became very popular with Romantic composers. Mendelssohn wrote "concert overtures" which were overtures which had nothing to do with an opera but were simply short pieces of music for orchestra which told a story. Hebrides Overture, for example, describes the sound of the sea lapping into Fingal's Cave in the Scottish Hebrides.

Franz Liszt made programme music very popular in his symphonic poems. Hector Berlioz was also very important for the development of programme music. His Symphonie Fantastique describes a story he made up himself about a man. This man is represented by a tune which is heard in different ways during the symphony. It is called an idée fixe (French for "fixed idea"). This way of linking a theme (tune) with a person led to Wagner's use of leitmotif in his operas in which a tune is linked to a person, event or idea. At the end of the 19th century Richard Strauss wrote several symphonic poems, often using a leitmotif to describe the person it is about. They include Don Juan, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A hero's life).