List of Program Music

List Of Program Music

Program music is a term usually applied to any musical composition in 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 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.

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

The orchestral program music tradition is also continued in some pieces for jazz orchestra. 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 explicit visualizations of a number of 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.