Capital-M Music

Music Theory Guides

Functional Music

By Richard Bruner

This is just a quick post to define some terms. I was just trying to look up a reference to link to explain what “functional music” is, and I discovered that the term has been co-opted to mean something else to many people now. There is a subset of commercial music that is “soundscapes” designed to enhance or alter brain states. This can be used to help a person focus, or to help them fall asleep among other potential uses. But this is a subset of what I mean when I say “functional music”.

To me, functional music is a term that refers to any music that serves a function outside itself, as opposed to “art music”, which is music for its own sake. If the main thing you are supposed to do is listen to music and not necessarily do anything else, then you have art music. Most classical concert music is intended for that purpose. You can use it in a functional manner - ranging from background music for ambience (either at home or out in public - putting classical music on the speakers at a mall, or even playing string quartets as background music at a fancy event or restaurant would be making something that could be art music into functional music, for example). But music that is written for dancing, whether electronica or folk dance music or any other kind of dance music is a functional purpose. Scores for any media property - film, tv, video games, commercials, etc is all functional, as is opera for similar reasons.

I saw another page that tried to say that music that evokes a painting or tells a story is functional, but that’s just a misuse of terms. They were referring to “program music”, not functional music. Program music is music that formally tells a story outside of the raw sound of the notes themselves, while remaining entirely sound-based (as opposed to music that goes with an external show of some sort as described above). Vivaldi’s Four Seasons violin concertos are some of the earliest surviving program music in the classical tradition, telling a story set out in a series of sonnets. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (No. 6) is often cited as one of the first program symphonies. Berlioz’ Symphonie Fanstastique is another early program symphony. Later in the 19th century this was common. Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is such a piece (and the story he set to music was actually the same story that Disney animated for Fantasia - most of the animations for Fantasia were not based on programs the composers used).