Knowra Absolute music Absolute music Instrumental music presented without an explicit narrative or program outside the music itself. Its meaning is understood through musical relationships rather than a stated subject.
Program music : Instrumental music intended to depict or evoke a story, scene, character, or other extra-musical subject. It makes explicit the narrative or subject that absolute music leaves unstated.
Eduard Hanslick : A nineteenth-century Austrian music critic who argued that music's content lies in its sounding forms. His formalist account gave a powerful theoretical defense of instrumental music's independence.
Instrumental music : Music performed by instruments without a singing voice. Absolute music is a particular kind of instrumental music.
Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven) : Ludwig van Beethoven's four-movement symphony in C minor, completed in 1808. Its tightly developed motifs invite formal listening despite popular narrative interpretations.
Vocal music : Music performed with the human voice, often carrying words or recognizable vocal sounds. Lyrics can supply the explicit meaning absent from absolute music.
E. T. A. Hoffmann : A German Romantic writer, composer, and critic whose music criticism presented instrumental music as profoundly expressive. His writing helped establish instrumental music as capable of meaning without a verbal program.
Sonata form : A musical structure commonly organized around exposition, development, and recapitulation of contrasting themes. Its thematic processes can create a complete musical argument without a program.
Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) : Ludwig van Beethoven's symphony completed in 1824, whose final movement includes Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy." Its choral finale crosses from instrumental abstraction into explicit words and a text.
Tone poem : A single-movement orchestral work that develops a literary, pictorial, or other extra-musical subject. This prominent program-music form stands near the center of the historical dispute.
Franz Liszt : A Hungarian composer and pianist who developed the symphonic poem and championed programmatic composition. His advocacy made the opposing case that instrumental music could gain meaning from a subject.
Show all 21