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.
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.
While non-professional listeners often claim that music has meaning (to them), "new" musicologists, such as Susan McClary,[1][incomplete short citation] argue that so-called "abstract" techniques and structures are actually highly politically and socially charged, specifically, even gendered.
More traditional listeners often reject these views sharply, asserting that music can be meaningful, as well as deeply emotional, while being essentially about itself (notes, themes, keys, and so on), and without any connection to the political and societal conflicts of our own day, but consciously associated with non-musical ideas, images, or events (poems, art works, etc.)
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.
While many cantatas by J. S. Bach contain programmatic elements, an example of outright program music is his Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992.
As it can invoke in the listener a specific experience other than sitting in front of a musician or musicians, it is related to the purely Romantic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk describing Wagner's Operas as a fusion of many arts (set design, choreography, poetry and so on), although it relies solely on musical aspects to illustrate a multi-faceted artistic concept such as a poem or a painting.
The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote many short pieces of program music which he called Tone Poems.
35, after the Arabian Nights entertainments (where the heroine is depicted by a violin and whose stories include "Sinbad the Sailor") and any number of orchestral suites from his operas, including The Tale of Tsar Saltan (which also contains "Flight of the Bumblebee"), The Golden Cockerel, Christmas Eve, The Snow Maiden, and The Legend of The Invisible City of Kitezh.
Alban Berg's Lyric Suite was thought for years to be abstract music, but in 1977 it was discovered that it was in fact dedicated to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.
Progressive rock groups and musicians during the 1970s in particular experimented with program music, among which was Rush's "Jacob's Ladder" (1980), which shows clear influences of Smetana's Má vlast ("My Homeland") (1874–1879).
In addition, Rush's songs "Xanadu", "La Villa Strangiato" "Red Barchetta", and "YYZ" also show their experimentalism with program music, as do parts of "2112", particularly the discovery scene.
Part of the music from the Baroque and Classical eras is absolute, as is suggested by titles which often consist simply of the type of composition, a numerical designation within the composer's oeuvre, and its key.
Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for two harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1060 and Mozart's Piano Sonata in C major, K. 545 are examples of absolute music.
Another well-known example is Heinrich Ignaz Biber's Sonata representativa (for violin and continuo), which depicts various animals (the nightingale, the cuckoo, the cat) in a humoristic manner.
His fifteenth string quartet, Opus 132, contains a middle movement titled "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart" ('A Convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode'), suggesting to some auditors that the entire work can be heard as a tonal evocation of sickness and recovery.
During the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, the increased influence of modernism and other anti-Romantic trends contributed to a decline in esteem for program music, but audiences continued to enjoy such pieces as Arthur Honegger's depiction of a steam locomotive in Pacific 231 (1923).
Well-known examples include Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry (1926–27) and Sergei Prokofiev's Le Pas d'acier (The Steel Step, 1926).
Influenced by the late Romantic work of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Ottorino Respighi, Richard Strauss, and others, motion picture soundtrack took up the banner of programmatic music following the advent of "talkies".