List of program music

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Program music is a term applied to any musical composition on the classical music tradition in which the piece is designed according to some preconceived narrative, or is designed to evoke a specific idea and atmosphere. This is distinct from the more traditional absolute music popular in the Baroque and Classical eras, in which the piece has no narrative program or ideas and is simply created for music's sake. Musical forms such as the symphonic poem, ballade, suite, overture and some compositions in freer forms are named as program music since they intended to bring out extra-musical elements like sights and incidents.

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Opera, ballet, and Lieder could also trivially be considered program music since they are unintended to accompany vocal or stage performances. They will be excluded from this list except where they have been extensively popularised and played without the original vocals and/or stage performance.

The orchestral program music tradition is also continued in some pieces for jazz orchestras. For narrative or evocative popular music, please see Concept Album.

Any discussion of program music brings to mind Walt Disney's animated features Fantasia (1940) and Fantasia 2000 (1999), in which the Disney animators provided graphic visualisation of several famous pieces of program music. However, not all the pieces used in the films were particularly programmatic, and in most cases, the narratives illustrated by the animators were different from whatever programmatic narrative might have existed originally.

List of program music by composer

Edmund Angerer

Johann Sebastian Bach

P. D. Q. Bach

Les Baxter

Ludwig van Beethoven

Hector Berlioz

Benjamin Britten

Anton Bruckner

Michael Colgrass

Aaron Copland

Claude Debussy

Debussy wrote more or less entirely in the 'program' style; see List of compositions by Claude Debussy

Paul Dukas

Antonín Dvořák

Edward Elgar

Many of Elgar's works are associated with favourite places, mostly in Herefordshire and Worcestershire where he lived, and his MSS are often noted as such

Duke Ellington

Alexander Glazunov

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was a prolific composer of symphonic poems, independent overtures and fantasias, who often drew his inspiration from history.

George Gershwin

Edvard Grieg

Ferde Grofé

Robin Holloway

Alan Hovhaness

Augusta Holmès

Charles Ives

Leoš Janáček

Albert Ketèlbey

Most of the better-known compositions of Ketèlbey are strongly programmatic, including:

Franz Liszt

Liszt is considered the inventor of the symphonic poem and his programmatic orchestral works set the framework for several composers of the romantic era. He composed a total of thirteen symphonic poems as well as two programmatic symphonies, drawing his inspiration from a variety of literary, mythological, historical and artistic sources.

Frederik Magle

Gustav Mahler

Much of Mahler's early work was designed programmatically. However, he made serious efforts to downplay the programmatic reputation of many of these pieces later in his life, including removing some of the programmatic titles from his symphonies.

Felix Mendelssohn

Olivier Messiaen

Modest Mussorgsky

Carl Nielsen

Maurice Ravel

Ottorino Respighi

Terry Riley

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Plus many other works inspired by myths and fairy tales

Gioachino Rossini

Camille Saint-Saëns

Arnold Schoenberg

Peter Seabourne

Jean Sibelius

Sibelius composed several tone poems throughout his career, often making use of stories and motifs from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. Early in his career he also wrote works on national and historical subjects.

Bedřich Smetana

William Grant Still

Richard Strauss

A major developer of the tone poem as a musical form, Strauss displayed outstanding skill at musical description. He claimed that he was capable of "describing a knife and fork" in music, and said that a sensitive listener to Don Juan could discern the hair color of Don Juan's amorous partners.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Nobuo Uematsu

Richard Wagner

Ralph Vaughan Williams

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a".
  2. ↑ "Four Sea Interludes | LA Phil". www.laphil.com. Archived from the original on 16 July 2012.
  3. ↑ Green, Edward (2011). ""Harlem Air Shaft": A True Programmatic Composition?". Journal of Jazz Studies. 7 (1): 28–46. doi: 10.14713/jjs.v7i1.9 .
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