Romantic Music: The Ideals Of Instrumental Music

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and others in the 19th century used the term, is music
associated with poetic, descriptive, and even narrative subject matter. This is
done not by means of musical figures imitating natural sounds and movements, but
by imaginative suggestion. Program music aimed to absorb and transmit the
imagined subject matter in such a way that the resulting work, although
"programmed", does not sound forced, and transcends the subject matter it seeks
to represent. Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance of
thoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond the
power of words to fully express.
Practically every composer of the era was, to some degree, writing
program music, weather or not this was publicly acknowledged. One reason it
was so easy for listeners to connect a scene or a story or a poem with a piece
of Romantic music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, was
working from some such ideas. Writers on music ...

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