Programmatic music composers biography

Instrumental musical rendition of a narrative

Not to be confused with Programming (music) or Concert program.

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumentalart music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative.

The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Programmatic music composers biography examples

The genre culminates in the symphonic works of Richard Strauss that include narrations of the adventures of Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, the composer's domestic life, and an interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of the Übermensch, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Following Strauss, the genre declined and new works with explicitly narrative content are rare. Nevertheless the genre continues to exert an influence on film music, especially where this draws upon the techniques of 19th-cen