When a writer commissions a composer to write music for a play, they must expect that the latter’s name will be henceforth associated with the title of the work. Just as it would be difficult to name from memory the authors of the words to all our favourite operatic arias, in the case of the drama Peer Gynt, many of us first think of Edvard Grieg, the composer of the brilliant music, rather than the playwright Henrik Ibsen. Over time, Grieg divided selected fragments of his music for the play into two suites that migrated out into the wide world, successfully detaching themselves from their theatrical original.

Exercises, studies and passages are, on the one hand, the bane of most musicians and, on the other, useful practice. Overheard by American composer Kevin Puts as he passed an auditorium, the simple harmonic progressions used by a pianist to play himself in may have influenced the shape of his warm-sounding Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra, written towards the end of the last century.

Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1, written a century earlier, stems from the tradition of Romantic programme music, although the composer himself denied that it was accompanied by extra-musical content. Somewhat in spite of the composer’s claims, researchers have arrived at the work’s precisely thought-out (though ultimately abandoned) programme, to be titled Musical Dialogue, drawing on such inspirations as poetry by Heine and probably also a Shakespeare play.