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 soeasy 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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