Descriptive music

One qualifies descriptive music all musical work containing a certain number of extra-musical elements - song of birds, battles, atmospheric phenomena, cries and noises various, real or imaginary, etc - translated or transposed in the musical language by means of a more or less realistic imitation .

Of vocal nature or instrumental, the descriptive music is opposed to the pure Musique and generally concerns the Musique to program.

For example, the Carnival of the animals of Camille Saint-Saëns, contains many descriptive elements: the Tempo of the cancan evoking the slowness of the tortoises, the serious sounds of the tuba to represent the hugeness of the elephant, the melancholic person melody of the Violoncello imitating the aspect of the swan slipping on water, the Xylophone, appearing the bones of the skeletons which dance, etc

The descriptive music does not constitute really a particular Musical genre: it is rather about one resource to which the Compositeur can have recourse, a simple characteristic likely to appear in such or such musical genre.

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