Yumi: Program music vs listeners' perception

The assertion that music should imitate proves that the eighteenth-century composers and philosophers considered instrumental music as program music. According to the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the program music “attempts to express or depict one or more nonmusical ideas, images, or events.” However, Lowe suggests that the “programs” evoked from music are not only created by composers, but listeners’ perception also has a big role in it. Taking the same motif, a brass fanfare for example, different listeners will have different reactions or emotions to it. Servants may feel inferiority and need to respect, on the contrary to a ruler who may feel admiration for himself by his people. As Lowe says, the hearings of musical works “are grounded in the social, cultural and political realities of listeners’ respective “privileged” historical listening contexts” (97) and thus, expressions “are in themselves neither natural nor artificial; they are but signs” (72). There’s so much a composer can express through compositional techniques, and everything is depends on listeners’ ability to think in his mind in order for music to have meaning.
Later in this article, Lowe takes three different fictional characters listening to Haydn symphony No. 88 for their first time to explain the centrality of intertextuality and subjectivity. Three different characters of different sex, status, and culture like/dislike the different parts of the symphony, and have different interpretations of the same measure. Lowe conclude this discourse by asserting that “to construct meaning freely assures the instrumental music of the late eighteenth century an ability to generate pleasure, aesthetic and otherwise, among its diversity of listeners.” (98)


1. Do you think the eighteenth-century music is program music? Although the concept of program music was not firmly established yet at that time, composers imitated nature through composition. On the contrary, do you still call it program music even though listeners perceive the music in different way than composers intended?
2. If all the instrumental music was subjective, how do you think composers strived to evoke a certain emotion? Do you think there was any technique composers used? or was it impossible to compose any music which everyone perceive it in the same way?