programme music

Instrumental music that interprets a story, depicts a scene or painting, or illustrates a literary or philosophical idea. The term was first used by Franz Liszt in the 19th century, when programme music was especially popular with composers of Romantic music (see Romanticism), but there had been a great deal of descriptive music before then. Examples include Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons concertos (1725), Ludwig van Beethoven's Eroica and Pastoral symphonies (1803 and 1808), Felix Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture (‘Fingal's Cave’, 1830), and the symphonic poems of Liszt and Richard Strauss.

Narrative and descriptive music
Liszt coined the phrase ‘programme music’ in the mid-19th century, originally using it for music that is introduced by a ‘programme’ and expresses (rather than describes) a poetic idea. Nowadays it is applied to any purely instrumental music based on a literary, pictorial, historical, biographical, autobiographical, or any other extramusical subject, as opposed to absolute music – music with a purely abstract meaning. The programmatic element can be as vague as simply having a descriptive title given to it by the composer to set the mood, or a much more detailed depiction of a scene or story. Often, however, it is impossible to tell the difference between the depiction of a scene and the composer's reaction to it.