Program music | EPFL Graph Search

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. The genre culminates in the symphonic works of Richard Strauss that include narrations of the adventures of Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, the composer's domestic life, and an interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of the Übermensch, Also Sprach Zarathustra. Following Strauss, the genre declined and new works with explicitly narrative content are rare. Nevertheless the genre continues to exert an influence on film music, especially where this draws upon the techniques of 19th-century late romantic music. Similar compositional forms also exist within popular music, including the concept album and rock opera. The term is almost exclusively applied to works in the European classical music tradition, particularly those from the Romantic music period of the 19th century, during which the concept was popular, but pieces which fit the description have long been a part of music. The term is usually reserved for purely instrumental works (pieces without singers and lyrics), and not used, for example for opera or lieder. Single-movement orchestral pieces of program music are often called symphonic poems. Absolute music, in contrast, is intended to be appreciated without any particular reference to the outside world. Composers of the Renaissance wrote a fair amount of program music, especially for the harpsichord, including works such as Martin Peerson's The Fall of the Leafe and William Byrd's The Battell. For the latter work, the composer provided this written description of the sections: "Souldiers sommons, marche of footemen, marche of horsmen, trumpetts, Irishe marche, bagpipe and the drone, flute and the droome, marche to the fighte, the battels be joyned, retreat, galliarde for the victorie.

An Annotated Corpus of Tonal Piano Music from the Long 19th Century

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Johannes Hentschel

We present a dataset of 264 annotated piano pieces of nine composers, composed in the long 19th century (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7483349). Annotations adhere to the DCML harmony annotation standard and include Roman numerals, phrase boundaries, and ...

Ohio State Univ, Sch Music2023

Quantifying high-order interdependencies via multivariate extensions of the mutual information

Michael Christoph Gastpar, Fernando Rosas de Andraca

This paper introduces a model-agnostic approach to study statistical synergy, a form of emergence in which patterns at large scales are not traceable from lower scales. Our framework leverages various multivariate extensions of Shannon's mutual information ...

2019