# Most successful program music, or Stravinsky's Bane



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Meaning, what program music most clearly lets you know what it's "about," simply upon hearing it? As a negative example, the program behind _Les Préludes _probably wouldn't be immediately obvious to most of us -- so it might not be "successful" in that sense.

But there are some pieces that communicate their stories or images quite clearly. Which works do you think do this best?


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

When I go to a concert and I get that little program that tells me they will be performing Beethoven's Late String Quartets... I know I'll be hearing just that.


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## Perotin (May 29, 2012)

Richard Stauss supposedly said: "I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher!" Maybe Strauss a bit overestimated his abilities, but his Alpensinfonie is a true masterpiece, I can clearly visualize all the scenes in this music.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Some of those that come to my mind are almost miniatures, very descriptive and in semiotic terms cases where the signifier can be said to really approach the signified:

*Langgaard*´s "_Insektarium_" 



 




*Nielsen*:"_An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands_" (sailing to the islands and their impressive fjord-cliffs, followed by a local country dance)




*Mosolov*:"_Iron Foundry_" 




Speaking of a synthesis of poetic and musical moods plus a literary programme, *Mahler*´s "_Das Lied von der Erde_" is an obvious, though of course debatable, candidate.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Perotin said:


> ...but his Alpensinfonie is a true masterpiece, I can clearly visualize all the scenes in this music.


But...if you had never heard the piece, or heard of it, would you visualize the same scenes? Not to say you wouldn't, but just asking!


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## Perotin (May 29, 2012)

And there is the famous flight of the bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov and piano transcription by Rachmaninov. I'm sure somebody would bring it up, but I had to be the first. :lol:


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A companion to R-R's bumblebee -- Paul White's Mosquito Dance. It has a happy ending, but not for the mosquito.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

A local variation on the mosquito dance theme, by Fini Henriques (1867-1940)


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

I think the Firebird is a contender for both halves of the thread title individually, to say nothing of together! The work is an excellent piece of programmatic music in the Rimsky-Korsakov vein, and on top of that, its own composer grew to nearly loathe it by the end of his career.


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## Perotin (May 29, 2012)

KenOC said:


> But...if you had never heard the piece, or heard of it, would you visualize the same scenes? Not to say you wouldn't, but just asking!


Not sure, I understand your question. Do you mean, if I never read the program and just listened to the music, weather I would still visualize the same scenes? Probably not. Music is so abstract, that it's hard to guess what concrete image composer had in mind. Well, in case of the Flight of the bumblebee I could imagine some anoying insects buzzing around.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Meaning, what program music most clearly lets you know what it's "about," simply upon hearing it? As a negative example, the program behind _Les Préludes _probably wouldn't be immediately obvious to most of us -- so it might not be "successful" in that sense.
> 
> But there are some pieces that communicate their stories or images quite clearly. Which works do you think do this best?


This is the kind of idea that drives me batty: music does not "communicate stories." It sends notes and rhythms to the ear in some combination of organized and disorganized fashion.

If it is combined with words, in speaking or singing, those words might be harmonizing with the notes, or operating in complete conflict with them.

It is the height of self-ignorance to assume that any of the associations made with a particular set of notes and rhythms are anything other than arbitrary, and narcissistically imposed.

There are habits of association that force-feed us "stories" and "ideas" we're supposed to associate with certain combinations of notes and rhythms, and if we're unconscious, eventually we take those associations as "natural," and attribute a "story" or "idea" to them.

But when that happens, we've lost complete insight into the origins of those associations, and are now taking fantasy as reality, which is the first step towards insanity.

Just my opinion, of course.

But then, look what happened with Wagner......  [I just had to do that... kidding.... I think....]


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

I'm not sure if there is any program music which can make me think of specific *visual* scenes, unless I already know the title of the work.

The only exception might be when the music contains sounds which resemble other sounds which we are already familiar with. So when Vaughan Williams imitates birdsong in the_ Lark Ascending_, then it is quite possible that one might naturally make the connection. Or when Berlioz plays with the Dies Irae in his _Symphonie Fantastique_, we know that someone is dying, since that's a tune we are already familiar with. But I'm not sure how successfully a piece of music can depict something silent, e.g. a mountain.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Copperears said:


> It is the height of self-ignorance to assume that any of the associations made with a particular set of notes and rhythms are anything other than arbitrary, and narcissistically imposed.
> 
> There are habits of association that force-feed us "stories" and "ideas" we're supposed to associate with certain combinations of notes and rhythms, and if we're unconscious, eventually we take those associations as "natural," and attribute a "story" or "idea" to them.
> 
> But when that happens, we've lost complete insight into the origins of those associations, and are now taking fantasy as reality, which is the first step towards insanity.]


I think you have pretty much defined normal spoken language here. So we're all insane if we don't know the origins of the words we use? Of course music, just like spoken language, communicates by a set of accepted conventions.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

joen_cph said:


> A local variation on the mosquito dance theme, by Fini Henriques (1867-1940)


Hah! That poor mosquito, gets it every time.


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

Vltava is pretty obvious, I suppose.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

KenOC said:


> I think you have pretty much defined normal spoken language here. So we're all insane if we don't know the origins of the words we use? Of course music, just like spoken language, communicates by a set of accepted conventions.


Right but which of those conventions produce the desire to open up to the world and discover more, and which leave the person trapped in the convention with the sad and artificial assurance that they know all there is to know, all they need to know, and that the associations they make as a result of those conventions are absolute, and universal?

The same question can be posed to language, or to music.

Habits of mind are reassuring, but risk becoming excessively provincial.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

arcaneholocaust said:


> Vltava is pretty obvious, I suppose.


I think maybe I've been unclear. By "successful" I mean program music that, even if you'd never heard it or heard of it, would communicate exactly what it's "about." Some examples have been given, largely dependent on aural cues. But I'm not sure anybody on hearing Vltava would think of a river, or specifically the Moldau. Could be wrong of course!


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

Here's a test:

What does the music here tell you this is "about"?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

KenOC said:


> Meaning, what program music most clearly lets you know what it's "about," simply upon hearing it? As a negative example, the program behind _Les Préludes _probably wouldn't be immediately obvious to most of us -- so it might not be "successful" in that sense.
> 
> But there are some pieces that communicate their stories or images quite clearly. Which works do you think do this best?


Beethoven's Symphony #6, "Pastoral" comes to mind, and also Vivaldi's Four Seasons. There is something about how they capture the images and patterns of nature. I think the bits that resemble birds and storms are very visual, no wonder them being used for all manner of TV ads - cars driving with an electric storm in the distance, that kind of stuff. Another thing is that the Vivaldi piece was based on poetry, I think which he wrote himself but I can't recall exactly.

I think Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is pretty good at this, especially the love theme and the storm at sea. Or the rocking motions that give the effect of being on a ship in 'Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea' from Debussy's La Mer. When winning an Oscar, film composer Dmitri Tiomkin paid tribute to Rimsky Korsakov for writing all of his film scores with those kinds of scenes. He was being facetious of course. Is this a case of a de-composing composer ghost writing?

Other more direct things are like Vaughan Williams' portrait of a day in the life of London, his Symphony #2 'A London Symphony.' Opening and closing with the chimes of Big Ben over rippling figures on the strings representing the Thames. In between, simulations of everything from the hustle and bustle of London's busy streets, the tinkle of a cab's bell, a street busker singing a cockney song, the call of a barrow boy and a march recalling some ceremony or royal parade.

And there is something about ostinatos that represent water. I have been listening to Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead and its got that in droves. Its that repetitiveness and rocking, almost a kind of sea sickness inducing effect (well, mentally not physically!).

I think Stravinsky's adage of music representing nothing but itself has limitations, but so too has the idea that music is as direct in terms of images as poetry or the visual arts. Of course its not, music is the least literal of all the arts and as a reference point its harder to grab onto than those. However things like programmatic works try to bridge that divide, and the ones that are less literal and more musical tend to go down well with me than those that are too prescriptive and use a "do it by numbers" approach.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Thanks, Sid, for mentioning the Pastoral. It's hard to believe that anybody from our musical tradition could fail to immediately grasp what it's "about." And interesting that at the time, Beethoven (and some critics) went to great pains to point out that it wasn't "tone-painting," evidently a somewhat debased genre. But of course, it is!


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Thanks, Sid, for mentioning the Pastoral. It's hard to believe that anybody from our musical tradition could fail to immediately grasp what it's "about." And interesting that at the time, Beethoven (and some critics) went to great pains to point out that it wasn't "tone-painting," evidently a somewhat debased genre. But of course, it is!


I had no idea what it was about, but I knew it was beautiful. One of my favorite compositions of all time. It's one of those pieces where what it's about doesn't really matter to me... so much more than words.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

KenOC said:


> Thanks, Sid, for mentioning the Pastoral. It's hard to believe that anybody from our musical tradition could fail to immediately grasp what it's "about." And interesting that at the time, Beethoven (and some critics) went to great pains to point out that it wasn't "tone-painting," evidently a somewhat debased genre. But of course, it is!


I suppose there is the feeling by a composer that he doesn't want to be too prescriptive and do what I called "by the numbers" music. Its funny how Debussy's music can be so visual and for example he didn't name his piano preludes until after composing them. He would have preferred not to give names to the second set of 12 at all but his publisher convinced him to do it. Of course its widely known how he hated the label "Impressionist."

On the flip side there is what Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe observed. Notes on the page tend to look like the landscape they are imaging. Bruckner's and Mahler's symphonies have these note rows ascending and descending, like mountains of the Alpine valleys. Sculthorpe's own music has these drones underpinning things, in some ways reflecting the flatness of much of the Australian continent.

Maybe its a combination of things. What is in the piece in terms of music and also the name which is given to it. Poetry aside, also historical context. I see Liszt's Les Preludes less as about the poem of its title and more about an expression of Hungarian nationalism. Written around 1848, you have that militaristic feel, Hungarians and others like Czechs where at war with the Habsburgs. No wonder Hitler used this exact piece as propaganda but of course he was twisting it to his own ends.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Can I nominate the scherzo of Bruckner's 8th for _least_ successful piece of program music?



> Main theme - named _deutscher Michel._ In the second part, the fellow wants to sleep, and in his dreamy state cannot find his tune: finally, he plaintively turns back.


The national personification of Germany is sleepy? I have no idea what I'm supposed to be picturing even having been told the programme in prose.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

KenOC said:


> I think maybe I've been unclear. By "successful" I mean program music that, even if you'd never heard it or heard of it, would communicate exactly what it's "about." Some examples have been given, largely dependent on aural cues. But I'm not sure anybody on hearing Vltava would think of a river, or specifically the Moldau. Could be wrong of course!


And without the title you would of course instantly grasp that Vox Balaenae is inspired by whale song.....


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

Copperears said:


> It is the height of *self-ignorance* to assume that any of the associations made with a particular set of notes and rhythms are anything other than arbitrary, and narcissistically imposed.
> 
> [...]
> 
> But when that happens, we've lost complete insight into the origins of those associations, and are now taking fantasy as reality, which is the first step towards insanity.


I'm not sure what you mean by that term, but has the uneasy feel of something insulting, directed at those who are happy to entertain the idea that music can communicate the 'extra-musical'. Perhaps it's 'just an opinion' that you might take care to express without swiping at fellow TCers!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

MacLeod said:


> I'm not sure what you mean by that term, but has the uneasy feel of something insulting, directed at those who are happy to entertain the idea that music can communicate the 'extra-musical'. Perhaps it's 'just an opinion' that you might take care to express without swiping at fellow TCers!


MacLeod, I'm sure that "self-ignorance" is a description of a very advanced spiritual state, used among those who practice various Eastern disciplines. Not to worry!


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> I'm not sure what you mean by that term, but has the uneasy feel of something insulting, directed at those who are happy to entertain the idea that music can communicate the 'extra-musical'. Perhaps it's 'just an opinion' that you might take care to express without swiping at fellow TCers!


Not a swipe; it's the opposite of self-knowledge, which I take to be an awareness of the situatedness and arbitrariness of one's existence. Take anything you think you know for granted as known, and you leave yourself blind; this applies to all of us, and sorry if I'm sounding like the Dalai Lama having just gotten drunk after finishing Heidegger's Being and Time....

I question everything, because life is an infinite onion. As are words.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

KenOC said:


> MacLeod, I'm sure that "self-ignorance" is a description of a very advanced spiritual state, used among those who practice various Eastern disciplines. Not to worry!


I just think of it as unconsciously willed blindness. The absence of science, really.


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

Copperears said:


> Not a swipe; it's the opposite of self-knowledge, which I take to be an awareness of the situatedness and arbitrariness of one's existence.


Oh that old thing. Self-knowledge is so totally overrated!


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> I'm not sure what you mean by that term, but has the uneasy feel of something insulting, directed at those who are happy to entertain the idea that music can communicate the 'extra-musical'. Perhaps it's 'just an opinion' that you might take care to express without swiping at fellow TCers!


One other thought: it's impossible NOT to have the extra-musical seep in at any musical moment; our experiences are all inextricably interwoven. There may be a beautiful melody a Chopin or Mozart composed that was in the composer's mind a plaintive song calling to his lost beloved, say. We will never have that context available to know in every such case. Similarly, we can't help but think about dinner digesting, bills unpaid or paid, birds and fields real or imagined, mountains with snow or gardens of roses while hearing music. The associations inevitably happen.

All I'm saying is that they are not fixed, not programmatic, they are culturally and situationally defined, not universal and eternal. Not everyone for all time will recognize the thunderstorm and the peasants coming out to dance and celebrate its ending in LvB's 6th, even though that may seem the case to us in our little circle.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> Oh that old thing. Self-knowledge is so totally overrated!


Or, as I'd enjoy saying in a drunken stupor: mushrooms live in bliss!


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

Copperears said:


> All I'm saying is that they are not fixed, not programmatic, they are culturally and situationally defined, not universal and eternal.


Agree 100% .


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

KenOC said:


> But there are some pieces that communicate their stories or images quite clearly. Which works do you think do this best?


When I was at school, my music teacher sketched a submerged cathedral on the blackboard while listening to this Debussy's prelude... well, now if I hear just a couple of chords of it, suddenly I have this image clearly pictured in my mind.

This is to say that, IMO, It's quite difficult to distinguish between absolute communication (i.e. music communicating a story/image per se - maybe only noises can do that?) and relative communication (i.e. based on personal or even collective background/knowledge - flight of the bumblebee is a good example, you know what it is because it's communicated by the title, not by the music itself).

Anyway, poor Debussy... just reduced to a program music composer....


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> I think you have pretty much defined normal spoken language here. So we're all insane if we don't know the origins of the words we use? Of course music, just like spoken language, communicates by a set of accepted conventions.


But those conventions are musical, not literal / literary, Doh! There is no possible literal translation from one medium to the other. In being told, then people associating the music with what they've been told it represents, then they can begin to believe it is "programmatic." Some will go so far as to say the music literally means this or that ;-)

The opening of Smetena's Ma Vlast readily conjures up, via musical material in a configuration and meter, _something_which certainly strongly suggests flowing _LIKE_ a river might, but that is really as far as it can usually go. [Add; so let's nominate Ma Vlast, a.o.]

But it is truly near fatal, and if not fatuous, just false to say that notes, rhythm, sound in a structure and the conventions that make it work are anything but at an extremely distant remove from being anything more than remotely _*analogous*_ to language.

P.s. The moment there is text, it is a piece with sung text, _not "programmatic."_ Programmatic is almost 100% supposedly representing something by purely musical means, eliminating language within the work, whether spoken, or sung. Language comes into programmatic music only via the titled premise of the piece, or an apart written presentation of the text / story / scenario it is supposed to illustrate or convey: written language only a preface to the score, in the program, or the title of the work.

ADD P.p.s. I'd refer anyone to the Harvard Dictionary of Music's entry on program music, or many another tome, the general consensus being that "good" program music does not at all rely upon its program, i.e. it can be followed and enjoyed without the listener having a clue "what its program is supposed to be about."

The rest, what people think is the most clearly communicative of program music, is as elsewhere here mentioned, a matter of preconditioning _(Hell! this composer gave me music with a title or program -- now I'll never hear it untainted.)_ If left to their own devices, you will find that a number of people in a room listening to the same unknown to them program piece might just well come up with a great number of varied inventions as to what that program is.

Rorschach blot time, yet again.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

.............. another dumbly duped post.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

Words shift in their connotations, if not denotations, too (and some would say, over periods of time, even denotations).

If we brought Samuel Johnson back from the grave and told him that bad meant cool, he'd think we'd gone insane.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Copperears said:


> Words shift in their connotations, if not denotations, too (and some would say, over periods of time, even denotations).
> 
> If we brought Samuel Johnson back from the grave and told him that bad meant cool, he'd think we'd gone insane.


Ah... from an age when "nice" meant "silly."


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

KenOC said:


> I think you have pretty much defined normal spoken language here. So we're all insane if we don't know the origins of the words we use? Of course music, just like spoken language, communicates by a set of accepted conventions.


Nope.

Not to get into that pesky "is music a language" thing, but this is simply wrong. Simply and entirely.

In any event, it is much more accurate and useful to say that language is a type of music. Music, however, is not a language. The qualities it shares with language are the qualities that have led me to conclude that language is a type of music--rhythm, pitch, duration, stuff like that. What they do not share are things like grammer and syntax and denotation, though I have seen all of those used, metaphorically, to describe music--but without acknowledging the metaphor, i.e., presented as literal.


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Ah... from an age when "nice" meant "silly."


"Fine" surely ?


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

From the OED, origin of the word, "nice": Middle English, from Old French, from Latin _nescius_ i.e. 'ignorant', _nescire_, Latin for "not know." Early connotations included coy, reserved, fastidious, scrupulous, fine, subtle.

So I guess back in the ME, introverts were considered stupid.

Wait, they still are!

Hence the advent of the French Horn.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Like Aaron Copland said, Is there a meaning to music? My answer to that would be yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? My answer to that would be, No. 

Programmatic music frustrates me. I always have trouble following the program unless I have a marked-up score, a time-stamped script, or if I've memorized the sequence of events. I prefer music which evokes an image of something, like Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture; it's more a picture than a story. 

Having said that, the opening of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin, even to a program-challenged person like me, sounds like what you would hear out of an open window in Manhattan.


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## Guest (Nov 27, 2013)

Hmmm. I just strolled through the whole thread again. I thought I'd done that before.

But now I find that my post just repeats, in brief, what PetrB had already covered.

I feel worthless now, so have to come up with something quick to make me feel important again!!

....

OK, try this: It is clear from reading this thread, from having read many threads, that lots and lots of people use music to create moods, to make pictures (moving or still), to imagine events. Some pieces, either by their titles or by their programs, seem to encourage this behavior.

But music does things that no other thing can even come close to doing. Poetry comes the closest, if that gives you a sense of how far beyond anything else music is.

I do not value paintings for their ability to rock me to sleep at night. I do not value poetry for its ability to sanitize my kitchen. I do not value architecture for its ability to dance the night away. There are other things much more suited to those activities.

I do not value music for what art or literature or sculpture or psychotherapy can do. I value music for what it can do that nothing else can do.

Weird, huh?

(For Berlioz, known as the programmatic composer par excellence, music did not exist to tell a story. At a time when it was considered de rigeur to supply a program, he did so for one piece. Once. That story was written after the music it accompanies and was revised more often and more extensively than ever the piece was. For all practical purposes, the music stayed the same while the story it supposedly told had to be tinkered with over and over again until it was abandoned. And Berlioz never wrote another program for any other piece.

His pieces all have literary, dramatic, poetic connections, however. Of course the operas. But the other symphonies and the overtures, too. Well, here's what Berlioz thought about that. He liked poetry, a lot. Especially dramatic poetry. Shakespeare. He was not, however, a dramatist himself. He was a fine writer, but not of plays. (Unless you count his libretti.) As a composer, however, he was always reading Shakespeare and finding things in those plays that words could not express. The words inspired him to do something in his own field of combining pitches and rhythms in time. Once the music was done, he very naturally honored the original inspirations with titles and headings.

Another thing that was at the time very common and taken for granted. Not, however, taken for literal. That had to wait for Richard Strauss and his boast.

In a very real way, the story of _Symphonie fantastique_ tells the symphony, not the other way around.)


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

This is where the legend all begins... You only need to hear the first 30 seconds, and you know you've been hurled into a POC-esque adventure-thriller!






(by POC I mean Pirates of the Caribbean, only this is in Russia instead )


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Just dropping by briefly now, but here is the quote I was talking about earlier by Peter Sculthorpe about what he sees as the relationship between the appearance of music on the page and its allusions to landscape:

_Composers, too, are draughtsmen, whether the music is handwritten or computer-derived. On the whole, if a piece of music looks right, then it has a good chance of sounding right. Often it sounds just as it looks. Much of my music looks horizontal: its elongated, overlapping shapes almost give the appearance of a geological map of this continent. My music could never display the Austrian peaks and crags that appear on many a page of Mahler._

(Peter Sculthorpe, _Sun Music_ (publ. 1999), p. 263)


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

Sid James said:


> Just dropping by briefly now, but here is the quote I was talking about earlier by Peter Sculthorpe about what he sees as the relationship between the appearance of music on the page and its allusions to landscape:
> 
> _Composers, too, are draughtsmen, whether the music is handwritten or computer-derived. On the whole, if a piece of music looks right, then it has a good chance of sounding right. Often it sounds just as it looks. Much of my music looks horizontal: its elongated, overlapping shapes almost give the appearance of a geological map of this continent. My music could never display the Austrian peaks and crags that appear on many a page of Mahler._
> 
> (Peter Sculthorpe, _Sun Music_ (publ. 1999), p. 263)


I bet he did/does computer drawing, too. :lol:


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> This is where the legend all begins... You only need to hear the first 30 seconds, and you know you've been hurled into a POC-esque adventure-thriller!


And like Pirates, you find yourself singing along.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

KenOC said:


> Thanks, Sid, for mentioning the Pastoral. It's hard to believe that anybody from our musical tradition could fail to immediately grasp what it's "about." And interesting that at the time, Beethoven (and some critics) went to great pains to point out that it wasn't "tone-painting," evidently a somewhat debased genre. But of course, it is!


I've never taken a walk in the country and thought, "aahhh sonata form!"


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

And I've never listened to Mozart's Requiem and thought, "Guy in a black shroud carrying sickle..."....


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Copperears said:


> And I've never listened to Mozart's Requiem and thought, "Guy in a black shroud carrying sickle..."....


Surely he's already been and gone by the time there's any need for a requiem?


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Three levels of bird-describing pieces, with various degrees of literal rendition:

*Denisov*:"Birds Singing" 




*Messiaen*: "Petites Esquisess des Oiseaux" 




*Nielsen*:"An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands" (2:55 etc)


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> "Fine" surely ?


Not quite accurately remembered, but here in no 4, "obsolete" nice = trivial.

NICE
adjective \ˈnīs\

: giving pleasure or joy : good and enjoyable

: attractive or of good quality

: kind, polite, and friendly
nic·er nic·est

Full Definition of NICE
1
obsolete
a : wanton, dissolute
b : coy, reticent

2
a : showing fastidious or finicky tastes : particular <too nice a palate to enjoy junk food>
b : exacting in requirements or standards : punctilious <a nice code of honor>

3 possessing, marked by, or demanding great or excessive precision and delicacy <nice measurements>

*4 obsolete : trivial*


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## Guest (Nov 28, 2013)

OK, so we don't want to deal with the sogenannt father of program music believing that music's expressivity was independent of language or images. OK.

But surely we can distinguish between music that supposedly expresses emotions or tells stories or paints pictures and music that uses things that are already sonic: bird songs, rain, trains, even other pieces of music or types of music like marches or waltzes. That's not programmatic as such as much as it is simply imitative.

And some of those imitations aren't all that clear. 

The things mentioned so far on this thread have been things that we already know about. So we know such and such about Beethoven's Pastoral and then we listen to it and then we report that yeah it does exactly x or y. Well duh. We already know that it's reputed to be doing x or y.

Those things cannot figure in answering the OP. Only if you can listen to a piece you've never heard and get out of it what some program says you should be getting out of it, can you answer the OP. And who among us has ever done that? And even if it's happened (it has happened to me--once), how much pre-knowledge generally went into that. (In my case, quite a lot, I'd guess.)

Take militaristic music. There is a sub-genre with pretty clear patterns and sounds. Cliches. All a composer has to do to evoke militaristic thoughts in a listener is to imitate that sub-genre's patterns and sounds. Easy. And I think a lot of the things that have been called "successful" program music fall into the category of successful imitation of sounds or musics that already have acquired associations, so are hardly examples of notes and rhythms communicating in the same way as words communicate.

And for why would one desire that music be able to do such a thing, anyway? Language already does that. So we need music to do something that some other thing already does? Painting, too. Painting already depicts scenes visually. So we need music to duplicate that? For why? Even if music could do that, and so far I have seen zero evidence that it can--and I'm not just talking about this particular thread, then why would you want it to do that? Painting and film and poetry and the like already do the things they do and do them very well. Music does what it does very well, too. 

Why not let it do it?


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## Guest (Nov 28, 2013)

Petwhac said:


> I've never taken a walk in the country and thought, "aahhh sonata form!"


Hah! But have you ever 'ambled' through a sonata and thought 'the composer's cuckoo'?


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

Pfft. Easy.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is about a rodent who enslaves a domestic cleaning implement to do his own bidding. If you can't identify the rodent in the music...well, you're just not listening


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## quack (Oct 13, 2011)

Wait! I know the answer to this.

Jacques Ibert's _Piece for flute solo_ sounds just like a piece for solo flute.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

I really don't care much for the programmatic aspect of music. I just like it for what it is, I don't want to be told what to feel or visualise in that regard. I also don't like extremely "emotional" music because I always get the sense that jt forces me how to feel about it.


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## Guest (Nov 28, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Not quite accurately remembered, but here in no 4, "obsolete" nice = trivial.
> 
> NICE
> adjective \ˈnīs\
> ...


Different dictionary. I meant 'fine' as in 'subtle', referenced earlier in the OED by,,,can't recall who it was...Copperears?


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> Different dictionary. I meant 'fine' as in 'subtle', referenced earlier in the OED by,,,can't recall who it was...Copperears?


Sorry, did not get the back reference, so rather off-point thought the various usages of the word through time were interesting


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Maurice Ravel certainly deserves some consideration for the prize for most evocative solo piano programme music. _Gaspard de la Nuit_ and _Mirroirs_ have some stunning little tone paintings.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

I like the way Erik Satie handled programmatic music in Sports et Divertissements. On the right side of the music book is the one-page piece with a running commentary under the music, and on the left is a picture of what the piece is depicting. The piece is in a sense audio-visual, so if you're playing it or just watching someone playing it, the cues on the page leave no doubt about what's going on.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Copperears said:


> This is the kind of idea that drives me batty: music does not "communicate stories."


well, maybe to communicate stories is very difficult, but it could evoke images or sensations very well. Soit's very fascinating to me to hear how the composer tries to evoke musically certain things.
For instance, take the first of the piano images composed by Debussy, Reflects dans l'eau.




At 1:48 to evoke the movement of the surface of the water he takes the melody and he breaks it rhythmically. And I think it's absolutely successful.
Other examples:

manuel de falla - danza del fuego
john foulds - isles of greece
dane rudhyar - stars
alkan - the wind
george crumb - night of the electric insects
george crumb - vox balenae
honegger - pacific 231 
ellington - daybreak express
red norvo - dance of the octopus
delius - a walk to the paradise garden
nielsen - the marketplace at isphahan
otto luening - moonflight
charles griffes - vale of dreams
sibelius - tapiola


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Manxfeeder said:


> I like the way Erik Satie handled programmatic music in Sports et Divertissements. On the right side of the music book is the one-page piece with a running commentary under the music, and on the left is a picture of what the piece is depicting. The piece is in a sense audio-visual, so if you're playing it or just watching someone playing it, the cues on the page leave no doubt about what's going on.


Unless, of course, they are red herrings, or the titles thought about after the fact of the music being written -- I don't believe that is the case with these Satie pieces, but consider the "three Movement" of his two-piano _Three pieces in the form of a pear (Trois morceaux en forme de poire)_, which is in seven sections, and know that Satie also "went _there_" in giving titles, since he had a major Dadaist streak to him


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## Guest (Nov 29, 2013)

Yes PetrB, but don't forget that Erik liked a drop of the old _absinthe_, know what I'm sayin'?


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

TalkingHead said:


> Yes PetrB, but don't forget that Erik liked a drop of the old _absinthe_, know what I'm sayin'?


Sorry, I'm not into glamorizing drug use or misuse. Credit for his eccentricity, creativity, and inclination to the surreal / dadaist in both music and his titles is best left to the fact he was a creative genius, not to what he ate or drank.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Sorry, I'm not into glamorizing drug use or misuse. Credit for his eccentricity, creativity, and inclination to the surreal / dadaist in both music and his titles is best left to the fact he was a creative genius, not to what he ate or drank.


In part, I agree. But you can't deny that drugs alter perception in a way that's not ordinarily obtained. Someone on acid is going to perceive a much different world than one who isn't... and their work will reflect that if they can translate the experience accurately.


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Sorry, I'm not into glamorizing drug use or misuse. Credit for his eccentricity, creativity, and inclination to the surreal / dadaist in both music and his titles is best left to the fact he was a creative genius, not to what he ate or drank.


A fair point; accepted.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Vesuvius said:


> In part, I agree. But you can't deny that drugs alter perception in a way that's not ordinarily obtained. Someone on acid is going to perceive a much different world than one who isn't... and their work will reflect that if they can translate the experience accurately.


Other than in some natural organic forms, LSD was not discovered until around WWII, and Satie would not have known it.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Other than in some natural organic forms, LSD was not discovered until around WWII, and Satie would not have known it.


Mushrooms are heavier, how I got this knowledge is *ahum* a mistery


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Other than in some natural organic forms, LSD was not discovered until around WWII, and Satie would not have known it.


I was using that to make a point. There are many natural hallucinogens that have been around way before Satie.

Also, I can guarantee his intake of Absinthe altered his perception and affected his work.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Absinthe isn't a hallucinogen. It's an urban myth.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

My vote goes to bread mold!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

ahammel said:


> Absinthe isn't a hallucinogen. It's an urban myth.


Seems to be more booze than myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Well, it _exists_, certainly, but it's not any more hallucinogenic than any other liquor.

Yeah, I could've phrased that better


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

ahammel said:


> Absinthe isn't a hallucinogen. It's an urban myth.


I thought the green fairy back then was mildly hallucinogenic? Of course the Absinthe they make now for the States isn't... I've had some of that.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Speaking of Satie, I think he was very creative in Descriptions Automatiques in writing a programmatic piece. Especially in the first one, _On A Boat_, not only does it sound like something rocking on the water, but in the middle of the piece he quotes a children's song, "Mama, the little boats that go on water, do they have legs?" If you're not thinking about a boat on the water, the song puts the picture in your head (at least if you know French children's songs, which his audience did).


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Vesuvius said:


> I thought the green fairy back then was mildly hallucinogenic? Of course the Absinthe they make now for the States isn't... I've had some of that.


Not unless they were cutting it with something. I've heard it suggested that it contained 'wood alcohol' in its traditional form, but wood alcohol doesn't cause you trip so much as, uh, go blind and die.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

ahammel said:


> Not unless they were cutting it with something. I've heard it suggested that it contained 'wood alcohol' in its traditional form, but wood alcohol doesn't cause you trip so much as, uh, go blind and die.


Haha, how unpleasant.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

ahammel said:


> Not unless they were cutting it with something. I've heard it suggested that it contained 'wood alcohol' in its traditional form, but wood alcohol doesn't cause you trip so much as, uh, go blind and die.


In its original form, absinthe contained grande wormwood, an herb considered chancy by some. The Wiki entry has much detail.


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## hreichgott (Dec 31, 2012)

Why would anyone listen to program music without having access to the title at least? Except maybe by accident on the radio or walking in on someone practicing, but then it's easy enough to find out what the piece was. Program music is meant to be listened to with awareness of the program. The verbal/pictorial associations are part of the work of art. If you're asking how successful it is at communicating the program to a listener who is unaware of the program, you're talking about a weird accidental case, not the way the composer intended the piece to be experienced.

You could always have under-informed listeners who don't have access to titles in their language, or who don't know that the Vltava is a river or something, but absolute music has its under-informed listeners too: are Bach's fugues failures because people who don't understand fugue structure won't be able to follow them?

For me program music conveys more information than a picture or a verbal description. It's different information. I would need a title to tell me that the Vltava is about a river in the composer's homeland, but the music does more than locate the river on a map, more than show me what it looks like or even more than if I went there and dipped my toes in -- the piece tells me what Smetana's own Vltava is. Through the piece I can experience the Vltava that exists inside the heart of Smetana, and the piece is the only thing that can show me that.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

Liszt's Dante Symphony, if not just for the first movement.


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