PROGRAMME MUSIC, a nickname which is the only cur rent term for instrumental music without words but descriptive of non-musical ideas. Musical sounds lend themselves to descrip tive purposes with fatal ease. A chromatic scale may suggest the whistling of the wind or the serenades of cats. Reiterated staccato notes may suggest raindrops or the cackling of hens. Again, music is powerfully suggestive of emotion; and the emotions it calls up may fit some particular story, or may resemble those inspired by a sunset or a storm. But chromatic scales, reiterated notes, emo tional contrasts and climaxes, are also normal musical resources; and nothing infuriates a musician more than the non-musical ex planation of such things where the composer's aim was purely musical. Sound as it occurs in nature is too inorganic to form the raw material for art, and so there is no natural tendency in music to include, as a "subject," any item not inherent in the art f orm. Explicit programme music has thus never been a thing of cardinal importance, though it has often been prominent and always popular. But the conditions of artistic creation are not to be confounded with any correct theory of art. The doctrine of art for art's sake is correct : but it concerns results, not processes; and many of the purest works of art have been produced for ulterior purposes.
Until recent times no composer has written for the voice with out words; for speech is a privilege which the human voice will not willingly renounce. No doctrine of absolute music will pre vent a good composer from shaping his vocal music to the words which he sets. Good literature will inspire him to explore and express its inner meaning. Bad literature may suggest to him the truths it misrepresents; and the great composers are quicker to seize the truth than to criticize its verbal presentation or to sus pect insincerity. The earliest mature musical art was, then, in evitably descriptive, since it was vocal. While programme music derives many of its characteristics from ancient times, it cannot properly be said to have existed until the rise of modern instru mental music, based upon external ideas and independent of the use of words.
A complete code of musical symbolism came to maturity in the 16th century. Part of it was profoundly true and characteristic
of moods ; part was harmlessly mechanical; and a few details were manifestly false, as when "atra nox" is represented by a curiously jaunty rhythm because that rhythm is indicated by black notes. When symbolism, true or false, has thus arisen in vocal music it may be expected to retain its intention in music without words. But we must not expect too much descriptive power in early instrumental music ; and when a scholar tells us that a funeral piece for organ by Froberger depicts in its final rising melisma the ascent of the soul to heaven, he unwittingly accuses Froberger of sinister intentions in a precisely similar funeral piece which ends with a descent to the lowest bass.
The resources of the modern orchestra can attain a realism which at first seems less ridiculous than that of earlier descriptive music. But the expensive realism of the dozen muted brass in struments that in Strauss's Don Quixote accomplish in ten re hearsals what a flock of sheep achieve extempore, is not less, but more childish than the thunderstorm in the Fitzwillian Virginal Book.
Beethoven's Theory of Expression.—On the other hand when superior persons object to the childishness of the birds and the thunderstorm in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony it is they who are childish in supposing that realism is in question at all. The real cuckoo, nightingale and quail happen to be musical birds whose themes are exactly what Beethoven wants for a break in the rhythm at a point of repose in the coda of his slow move ment. Similar final digressions can be seen in slow movements with no programme at all, e.g., in the violin sonata of 24, the pianoforte sonata in D minor (op. 31 No. 2), and the string quintet in C major, op. 29. Not a bar of the Pastoral Symphony would be otherwise if its "programme" had never been thought of. The "merry meeting of country folk" is a subject that lends itself admirably to Beethoven's form of scherzo (q.v.) ; and the thunderstorm, which interrupts the last repetition of this scherzo and forms a tremendous introduction to the peaceful finale, is as musical as other unique features in Beethoven's pure art-forms.