Program music is music which tells a story or paints a picture in sound. It often describes scenery or literary subjects and was a commonplace of Romantic composition.

 

The phrase "program music" was coined by composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) in the early 1850s, along with the term "symphonic poem". Liszt believed that developments in harmony and orchestration during the 19th century necessitated a break with the formal patterns for organizing a composition that had been advanced a century earlier, as the development of content and form must go together – as he put it, "New wine demands new bottles". He also believed that music could benefit from a relationship with the other arts: it could be a "program" inspired by a story, play, or poem, rather than just abstract constructions in sound.

 

Liszt was not the first to bring extra-musical aspects into music or to make radical changes to compositional practice; there are many earlier works that imitated or alluded to events or characters within a traditional form. Examples include Jean-Philippe Rameau's The Hen (1728), Ludwig's Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 (1808), or Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830). Liszt's works were not directly representational, meaning that they did not mimic precise events through sound effects, rather they were suggestive. As he described, "Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts, and especially in the art of words". Liszt opened the door to individualized formal developments, rather than predefined models, a trend that continues to the present day.

 

During Liszt's lifetime, controversies had already begun about whether music has a content outside of the sound itself – a perhaps unsolvable aesthetic discussion that remains relevant today. Not least are these discussions apparent with the prevalence of representational film music, in which music often is supposed to amplify or mirror the narrative on screen, often with a preconceived and universal vocabulary of musical gestures.