IV.

Other Developments

Other kinds of program music are exemplified by La danse macabre (1874), a study in the grotesque, by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns; the Enigma Variations (1899), which paint tonal portraits of a group of friends, by British composer Sir Edward Elgar; The Afternoon of a Faun (1894), a musical evocation of the poem of the same name by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, composed by Claude Debussy; and Music for a Great City (1964), an orchestral work describing the life of New York City, by American composer Aaron Copland.

Program music also has been used as political propaganda, as in the Third (May Day) Symphony (1931) by Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich.

More recent composers, particularly those employing the twelve-tone system, have tended to emphasize the abstract nature of music and, if they used titles at all, to choose them for their general rather than specific connotations, as in Differences (1959) by Italian composer Luciano Berio and Moments (1965) by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Music produced by synthesizer or electronic tape can be said to reverse the traditional procedure in musical description, because it works with recognizable extramusical sounds from many sources and, by blending, mixing, and distorting them, takes what was specific into the realm of the abstract. Much music of this kind has been used to describe the fantastic or antic aspects of life, as in Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) by Morton Subotnick. American composer John Adams has introduced programmatic elements into his compositions, such as the orchestral work My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), which he describes as “a piece of musical autobiography.”