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instrumental music that carries some extramusical meaning, some “program” of literary idea, legend, scenic description, or personal drama. It is contrasted with so-called absolute, or abstract, music, in which artistic interest is supposedly confined to abstract constructions in sound. It has been stated that the concept of program music does not represent a genre in itself but rather is present in varying degrees in different works of music. Only in the so-called Romantic era, from Beethoven to Richard Strauss, is the program an essential concept, and even there it leaves its mark on much music commonly considered “pure” or “absolute.”
In a sense, it is impossible to speak of purely abstract music; any work of art must have some “content,” some series of images, states of mind, or moods that the artist is trying to project or communicate—if only the sense of pure abstractness. For example, a siciliana (a composition using an Italian dance rhythm) bears in its rhythm associations of tranquillity for many listeners. Most music works on such a symbolic and evocative but not directly descriptive level. Thus, Beethoven considered his Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) “more an expression of feeling than painting.” A few examples of literal “tone painting” aside (such as the bird calls in the second movement), the Pastoral depicts the emotions one might feel in the surroundings of nature or perhaps some other human situation.
There is a descriptive element in the music of many cultures, from the stylized sounds of falling rain and snow in Japanese samisen music to the vividly evoked plagues in George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt (1739) and the bird calls, battle sounds, and so forth appearing in European music (instrumental and vocal) for several centuries. But the development of music with a pervasive program, like the term program music itself, is a uniquely 19th-century phenomenon, beginning precisely with Beethoven, for he unified the movements of a symphony or sonata into a psychological whole. Not only the Pastoral but the Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) and many later works exhibit this feature, in which contrasting states of mind are brought into immediate contact, and, occasionally, the process of transition between them is explored.
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