ABSTRACT
The program music is more productively viewed as a hermeneutic genre than as a stable, ontological property of any individual work. Within the European art-music tradition the terms illustrative music and program music refer to instrumental compositions that invite their listeners to attend to them with the aim of grasping their correspondences with pre-given external images, texts, sounds, situations, ideas. The standard observation is that music, unlike language or painting, is incapable of unequivocally denoting non-musical objects or images, much less asserting propositions. The meaning of the musical sign is not to be sought in the world at all. Fundamental to all associative listening and relatable to the general, question of musical signification is the operation of metaphor: one thing is heard as being like, different thing. Topic and metaphor theories remind us that music, as encountered in total listening situations, harbors a richness of potential implication that can be experienced and reflected upon in a variety of ways.
