[MUSIC] How do we communicate one human being to another? Sometimes we do it through spoken words. Sometimes through signs or symbols, algebraic letters and numbers, for example. Or sometimes just through gestures without words, as is true of the communication or messages sent to us by a mime. Here we see the famous Marcel Marceau, silently communicating two very different emotions. Sometimes gestures are accompanied by music and dance, as we see here. Gestures and dance are at the heart of a communicative art we call ballet. The ballerina acts out the meaning of the ballet through gestures and dance, the meaning of the story. Animals in the animal kingdom, dolphins, whales, birds and others well, they communicate by sounds. Sounds that sometimes seem very similar to what we humans call music, but humans usually communicate through spoken language as I'm communicating with you now. And here is how it works. Over time, a group of people, let's say all the people living on the island of Japan or in France, they will agree upon the meaning of a set of phonemes, a set of sounds. And they place these phonemes in an order, in a sequence that forms a sentence, a unit of sense that makes sense to those who understand this language. These organized phonemes communicate meaning and feelings, anxiety, fear, joy, sadness, whatever. The sounds of classical music, well they also communicate, of course. They too communicate anxiety, fear, joy, sadness. And when these sounds, the meaning of which we've all come to agree upon commonly are strung together, this music too communicates to us. When meaning filled sounds come in a purposeful order, such music can narrate a story, tell a tale. A story about an event in the life of a hero, or of a people, or maybe of a sequence of events, human or, as experienced in nature. When such a story is told exclusively through instrumental music, what we've created is called program music. Now, the art song or Lied that we just studied in an earlier session, well, that's not program music because there are lyrics there. There's a text that tell us a story. Ballet is not program music because the acting and the pantomiming of the dancers suggest the meaning of the story as well. So program music is purely instrumental music, thus, a definition of program music. Program music is instrumental music, usually written for a symphony orchestra, that seeks to re-create in sound the events portrayed in some extra-musical source, a story, a legend a play, a novel or even an historical event such as a military battle. Well how about some examples Greg? Okay, likely you've heard for example of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in which Tchaikovsky tries to recreate events in music of the Battle of Borodino between Napoleon's troops and the Russians in 1812 or the story of Romeo and Juliet as retold through music, again, by Tchaikovsky. Or Mendelssohn's overture to Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the composer attempts to capture, in sound, the events that unfold in that play. The 19th century was a high watermark of program music, and many composers used it as a better form of communication, a way to communicate better with the listener, music as narrative. As composer Franz Liszt said about program music, and let me grab my note card here. This is what he said, Program music protects the listener from a wrong interpretation of the music and directs his attention to the poetic idea of the whole end quote. But not every composer was taken with the notion of program music. Johannes Brahms wrote no program music. He didn't want his music to tell a story. Maybe he thought program music was too simple, or naive, or too restrictive of the imagination of the listener. Brahms wanted only to communicate feelings and sensations. This sort of music, as opposed to program music, came to be called Absolute music, Pure music, if you will. You can see here a definition of it. But let's stick with program music and find out how it came to be and how it works.
