You may remember when we were looking at music in the Baroque Period and we
listened to "The Four Seasons" by Vivaldi and I said that that was a piece that
was way ahead of its time
because it was trying to depict something very particular in instrumental music.
Now, that time has caught up.
In the Romantic Period we have a lot of composers who write instrumental music
specifically trying to
tell us something.
So, up until this time we've had music that's mostly music for the sake
of it.
We call that absolute music.
this music now we call program
music because there's some sort of program that goes with it or a story or
something.
So, composers
really intended for you to hear something.
now as i've said earlier
you can listen to music all you want and you can paint
any kind of musical pictures you want in your head,
even if the composer never had any intention of
creating
that particular image in your head. I could put
ten people in a room. I can play you all a piece of instrumental music and you might
all come out with very different mental pictures to go with it,
and that's going to be true
even with this program music.
The big difference here is that the composer actually intended
to make you think something.
So, how do they do that?
There are four different kinds of program music that we talk about,
and each of them has its own little
idiosyncrasies, we'll say. So let's just quickly go through what those four types
are
and they we'll have some separate segments that introduce you to each one
in more detail and let you listen to an example.
So let's start with the concert overture
We know that an overture, in the past, has been a piece that was played before
something else.
So you go the opera,
there's an overture
before the performance starts. That's what we think of when we think of overture.
A concert overture
doesn't have that function.
And a concert overture is a free-standing piece, so it's not intended to be leading
up to anything else. It just is a piece for itself.
Most of the time, the story that the composer wants us to get from a
concert overture
has something to do with literature.
So, Romeo and Juliet is very good example of that,
concert overture telling us the story of Romeo and Juliet
in instruments.
No words, no text, there's nobody reading a story over the top of it.
So the composer has to know
the content of that story
and make decisions about,
how am I going to represent that so people will know what I'm talking about?
so if we take Romeo and Juliet as an example,
we know we've got two major characters, the two leads,
so composer might make a specific melodic element that represents each one.
So Juliet, she's a young girl, maybe we make a lovely little melody that represents
Juliet.
Romeo is our hero maybe we make him a little more manly kind of melody, whatever
that might be.
We know there's sword fighting in there so we can have
clashing cymbal sorts of things to represent sword fighting. We have
the love scene at the balcony so you would have some sort of romantic thing
going on there.
Composer makes a choice about that
and assumes that his audience knows the story well enough
to make those associations. So that's what happens in a concert overture.
You go to a concert, you hear this piece. You don't see anything on the stage that has
to do with the story.
Second kind of program music!
Incidental music.
Incidental music is like background music for a play.
This is before movies and all those sorts of things
but people would put theatrical productions on,
they might have an orchestra to play
music to support that production.
So, in this case,
this is not music that happens all the time.
If it were playing all the time we'd never hear the actors saying their lines.
So a lot of this music is...
fits with the story line so if there's a scene in this story where there's a dance
it will be very appropriate to have incidental music
for them to dance to,
or maybe there is...
somebody's dying
and you need some deeply tragic sounds
to really reinforce this death scene that we're happening.
So composer might write music specifically to go with the play. The
play would be on the stage,
the orchestra would be in the pit,
and their music would support the action. That's called incidental music.
Third type is called program symphony.
We've already looked at symphony, we know that that's usually a four movement piece,
it has a very particular kind of structure within that sonata cycle,
it's for an orchestra. So we know those things about the symphony as a genre.
Program symphony basically follows that same format. It's for an orchestra
and
it's in multiple movements.
But the number of movements might not be four!
Why would we do that?
Here's the big reason. It depends on what story the composer is trying to tell.
Maybe
this is not a story that fits neatly into our sonata allegro slow movement
minuet trio
fast movement kind of format.
So, the composer's going to make decisions about not only how many movements there
are
but how those movements will be structured. Maybe it's not appropriate
for the last movement to be something
fast and lively. Maybe the character is dead at the end of the story. That wouldn't be
appropriate.
so, it's going to follow the same basic structure as a symphony,
multiple movements,
but they're not going to be in that very structured format that we've been
seeing so far.
Program Symphony!
The last one is called the tone poem
or symphonic poem.
This is a term that was applied by Franz Liszt who wrote lots of them
and again, like the concert overture, it's a one movement piece.
So how's it different from a concert overture?
To your ears,
it's probably not, you won't be able to tell any difference by listening
The basic difference between the two
is in what it's trying to depict.
If you'll remember, I said that a concert overture often has something to do with
some sort of literary reference.
In a tone poem,
the scope of things that you can describe is much wider,
so we might still stick with the literary reference,
but we might also do some sort of historical
event
that we want to depict.
We might take a piece of epic poetry
and try to describe that. There is a very famous one called Don Juan, so
it's the story of Don Juan, the Casanova who's got women all over the
place,
and all of his adventures.
The breadth of things that we can cover is more.
We might do
things that have to do with our environment. What's our landscape
like. Something about
a majestic site you might have seen.
All of those things would be appropriate for use as a tone poem.
So, these are the four big categories.
As you look for pieces of music that fit these categories,
one of the things you can look for is titles
because the titles are generally going to tell you
what the story is.
Ein Heldenleben, which is a hero's story. That tells you right
there, there's a story connected to this piece.
Don Juan.
Romeo and Juliet.
If it says "Symphony Number 6 in C minor,"
it's probably not program music because that tells us nothing about
what the piece is supposed to represent for us.
So as we look at specific examples of this type of music,
we'll be thinking about the story or the picture or whatever it is the
composer's trying to create for us
and figure out how
they took the elements of that,
transferred them into sounds instead of the words and pictures, and gave us
a whole new type of artwork
that is unique and new in the Romantic Period.