One difference between music of today and earlier times is the sophistication of program music, or music that represents things that aren’t music. In the past, music could imitate nature, like thunderstorms; or physical activity, like marching, rowing, climbing, falling and so on. And music still does that today, as we can see in lots of cartoons. But now we have more actual data on things we wish to represent; and we can use that data itself to generate music. In this talk we will reflect on representational music from Bach and Beethoven to the present day, including some of my own recent pieces and data sonifications.