Program Music

Studies of program music explore ways in which extra-musical material is expressed and interpreted through music. Conceptions of program music are broadly construed and vary throughout history in correlation with various aesthetic and philosophical perspectives—narrowly defined, programmatic compositions include an extra-musical program describing the musical expression, while a broader definition considers evocative titles, allusive musical material, and conventional musical significations as vehicles of extra-musical meaning. The question of aesthetic value arises in the debate surrounding the ability of music to communicate extra-musical ideas and the quality of music that claims to do so. This question is extensively explored through the polemics of the 19th-century “War of the Romantics,” pitting programmatic music against “absolute music.” Musical and theoretical writings of figures such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Hanslick provide rich source material informing many studies on program music. The distinction between program music and absolute music is blurred through various approaches to deriving meaning from both types of music. Theories of narrativity propose methods of interpreting formal structures, tonal progressions, and thematic devices interacting in ways reminiscent of literary narrative. Semiotic approaches explore meanings that arise from conventional significations of genre, style, and “topics,” evoking cultural understandings of social position, setting, and affect. Applying interpretive strategies such as these to programmatic music allows for hermeneutic readings mapping the extra-musical program onto the musical events to explore meaningful points of intersection or contradiction. Further studies draw connections to composer biography and sociohistorical context, positioning the music in philosophical perspectives and reception. Broader cultural and political situations inform readings of underlying implications such as nationalism or social commentary. Current studies of program music explore musical narratives in nuanced contexts that parse the historical and cultural atmospheres surrounding composers, their music, and reception to propose new readings and frames of interpretation.

Anthem Creation for a New Nation (Intermediate)

Politics can be a tricky subject to navigate in the classroom. In the project described in this chapter, students create a fictional country and national anthem that encapsulates the political views of a fictional new nation. Students have the opportunity to be creative and critical thinkers without the fear of backlash for sharing ideas. Essentially, students are shown the concept of programmatic music and how certain musical elements can conjure extramusical ideas. This project is designed for students in a high school computer-based music production class. It is intended to be completed in pairs, but the teacher may adjust this arrangement depending on the culture of the classroom. This project could also serve as a great music camp activity.

Visualizing Peter: The First Animated Adaptations of Prokofiev’sPeter and the Wolf

Adapting the vivid programmatic music of Prokofiev’sPeter and the Wolf(1936) into an animated film could have been a straightforward process, yet the earliest animated versions took significant artistic liberties with Prokofiev’s symphonic tale, projecting vastly different interpretations of the story. Walt Disney produced the first animation in 1946 in an anthology of shorts released to theaters. In 1958,Soyuzmultfilm—a Soviet Studio—created a stop-motion puppet version. Both screen adaptions make cuts to Prokofiev’s score, reorder musical segments, and rewrite parts of the narrative. A comparison of Prokofiev’s concert version with these animations reveals a fascinating reception history over two decades from both Soviet and American perspectives. Although deceptively simple on the surface, these animated films are sophisticated artistic expressions conveying nuanced political and cultural values.

Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Socialist Realism, and the Mass Listener in the 1930s

Symphonic music composed under Stalin presents both ethical and aesthetic problems. Often assumed to have been composed in a compromised style by composers who were either coerced into abandoning their “real” modernist inclinations or who were in any case second-rate, these works have been labelled variously socialist realist, conformist, conservative, or even dissident, depending on the taste and opinion of those passing judgement. This article argues that picking and choosing which symphony is socialist realist and which is not cannot be justified either logically or historically, and that we should no longer attempt to define any non-texted or non-programmatic music in this way. The Anglophone term “middlebrow” holds out the possibility of describing this repertoire without implying ethical or artistic compromise on the composers’ part, acknowledging that, in the absence of any elite or “highbrow” musical culture, composers shared the aim of reaching a mass audience.

An Exploratory Study of Narrative Experiences of Music

Listeners frequently talk about music in terms of imagined stories, but little empirical research has investigated this tendency. In this study, 47 participants listened to eight 90-second musical excerpts—four of which featured programmatic music composed between 1857-1935 and were selected by music theorists to feature high contrast, and four of which featured Baroque and minimal music and were selected by music theorists to feature low contrast. After each one, they answered a variety of questions intended to assess their narrative engagement with the music. Brief assessments of personality and general listening tendencies were administered at the end of the session. Results showed qualified support for the notion that contrast makes people likelier to hear music in terms of narrative, with stylistic familiarity and enjoyment seeming to play a greater role. The most striking aspect of the results was the emergence of broad areas of consensus among the free descriptions of imagined narratives. People with high AIMS scores also tended to experience more narrative engagement with the music, as did people low in Extraversion and Conscientiousness.

Realism, Idealism and the French Reception of Hanslick

When Charles Bannelier’s French translation of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was published in 1877, it elicited discussions among French musicians and critics that can seem puzzling from our twenty-first century vantage point. The French were almost entirely ambivalent to the issue of descriptive versus non-programmatic music and were perfectly comfortable disregarding this seemingly central point of contention in Hanslick’s treatise. French critics focused instead on issues that seem tangential to the main thrust of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: German music education, the merits of philosophy versus philology, and so forth.The French reception of Hanslick becomes less puzzling, however, when we consider the conceptual framework within which French musical discourse operated in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, musical aesthetics and criticism in France were an extension of broader trends in French intellectual culture, in which a materialist, realist view of the world vied with a metaphysical, idealist conception of the divine. Between these two ideological poles lay a rich spectrum of ideas that had profound ramifications for music and art criticism. The degree to which works of art could be understood as products of historical circumstances, for example, or whether art embodied ineffable meanings resisting explanation, were questions whose answers depended on one’s position along this realist–idealist spectrum.In this article, I show how this tension between realism and idealism formed the conceptual framework for French critics’ readings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. I survey writings by Théodule Ribot, Jules Combarieu, Camille Bellaigue and others to show how this network of texts, when placed alongside each other, was effectively a manifestation of the realist–idealist spectrum. By putting these writings in conversation with each other, this article brings to light the intellectual premises of French writings on music in the nineteenth century. Only by understanding these premises, I argue, can we make sense of the French reception of Hanslick.

"Harlem Air Shaft": A True Programmatic Composition?

<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: &quot;Adobe Caslon Pro&quot;;">In 1944, Duke Ellington told a writer from <em>The</em></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: &quot;Adobe Caslon Pro&quot;;"> <em>New Yorker</em></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: &quot;Adobe Caslon Pro&quot;;"> that his composition “Harlem Air Shaft,” recorded four years earlier, was inspired by the myriad sounds heard in the air shaft of a Harlem apartment building (“You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love…”). Many scholars have contended that Ellington invented this “storyline” <em>after</em></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: &quot;Adobe Caslon Pro&quot;;"> the composition was written. This article addresses the authenticity of “Harlem Air Shaft” as programmatic music. The author finds ample evidence—from unpublished manuscripts, unissued radio broadcasts, analysis of arranging devices and compositional design, and other Ellington testimony—that Ellington did indeed have the sounds and smells of a Harlem air shaft in mind as he wrote the composition.</span>

Nonmusic Majors' Cognitive and Affective Responses to Performance and Programmatic Music Videos

This study was designed to compare the effects of different kinds of visual presentations and music alone on university nonmusic students' affective and cognitive responses to music. Four groups of participants were presented with excerpts from the first and fourth movements of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major (“Pastoral”). Two groups heard music excerpts only, one interpretation conducted by Stowkowski and one by Bernstein. One of the video groups viewed corresponding excerpts from the movie Fantasia while listening to the Stowkowski recording. A second group viewed and listened to a performance video of the Vienna Philharmonic filmed during the Bernstein recording. All students (N = 128) completed cognitive listening tests based on the excerpts, rated the music on Likert-type affective scales, and responded to two open-ended questions. Significant effects of presentation condition were found. Cognitive scores were higher for the performance video than the music plus animation video on both movements. Scores for the two music-only presentations were not significantly different from each other or the two video presentations. Although affective ratings were not significantly different in magnitude between the presentation groups, the animation video (Fantasia.) presentation ranked consistently higher in affect than the other presentations. Implications of these results regarding the effects of different types of visual information presented to music listeners are discussed.