Instrumental music
Music performed by instruments alone, as opposed to vocal music.
What it means
Instrumental music is music performed by instruments alone, without singing and without a sung text. It thus stands opposite vocal music, which rests on the human voice, but can occur combined with it in the same work, for instance as the orchestral accompaniment of a song.
Musical use
From the Baroque onward, instrumental music gained increasing weight of its own compared with the long-dominant vocal music: the sonata, concerto, symphony, and string quartet developed into independent, purely instrumental genres. The Classical and Romantic periods made instrumental music the place of abstract, “absolute” musical ideas that need no text for interpretation, while program music hints at extra-musical content.
Instrumental music should be distinguished from vocal music, which rests on a sung text, and from incidental music, which combines instruments with action and often singing too. Strictly speaking, instrumental music does not necessarily include electronic, non-classically instrumental sound production.
Performance practice
Listen to instrumental music especially for the musical narrative that manages without words: themes, contrasts, and recurrence take on the role that text plays in vocal music. If you play instrumentally yourself, shape phrasing and breathing as if you were singing a line of text, even without words.