A New Step in Music Since the beginning of organized music in the Middle Ages, like all the other fields of creativity and study, such as art, philosophy, and architecture, music has made leaps and bounds in the flow of progression. The Romantic period was a time when music began to take on a different meaning. The music began to become more subjective as opposed to objective music of the Classical period. The artist or composer became much more important as an individual. An example of one of these progressions occurring mainly during the Romantic period was when composers and audiences alike started turning towards program music. Program music is "the term for a nonvocal music that is associated with a poem, a story, or some other literary source; the literary text itself is the program. This new style of music created waves of joy and of controversy that still exist today. This form of music was first derived to fulfill a greater need to cease creating and continuing boundaries in the separate fields of art. Before this period music and paintings or in this case music and literature were not meant to be intertwined. The people did not see a need for it since each field was considered a separate entity of itself. Bent 2 During the romantic period, the general feeling began to surface that music could be made even more expressive by channeling it through literature; especially poetry. I believe a lot of this had to do with the new, relaxed frame of thought for the time period, and the genius of William Shakespeare's writing capabilities. The issue surrounding program music is that critics ridicule the idea that the music can actually illustrate a program. They ask the question that if the audience did not know it was program music, then could they identify it as so, once heard. Some say that it is entirely possible, and even would be hard not to while others claim that there could quite possibly be no clues to the fashion of program music.