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Article: Le Poeme symphonique et la musique a programme.
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- Article date:
- December 1, 1995
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Music Library Association, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Due to the scarcity of books and studies devoted to program music, any new endeavor deserves to be saluted warmly. Michel Chion attempts a comprehensive treatment of the topic, from Greek antiquity to 1991. It surpasses its closest predecessor, Leslie Orrey's Programme Music: A Brief Survey from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975) in the amount of information it covers, its length (336 pages of text as opposed to 192), and, since Orrey's book stops around 1961, its currency.
Slightly diverging in content from the title, Chion's book covers only some program music outside the symphonic poem, and we are promised that the programmatic ...