> To clarify my point, I don't disagree with you, but what I'm interested in,
> in music, is just what happens if you do have only the tape and no knowledge
> whatsoever of how it was made. What they used to call "absolute music" back
> in the 19th century. Music that is completely without any programmatic or
> performance reference, except for what you hear.

Uh.  I'm not sure you really mean what you say, but in case you
do, please allow me to clarify a few points here.

While aesthetics overall is a muddy field, it has been clear now
for centuries that there is no such thing as naive perception.
Unless you invest concepts in the first place, you don't perceive
at all.  Your idea of such a "pure" perception only works in an 
ontologically naive world without various candidate frameworks. 
At times, the natural sciences still try to convey such an ontology
of "absolute" natural laws.  However, a glimpse at the history of
science shows that this framework has always been elusive at best.
Surely, the domain of the arts would be even less disposed to 
support that notion!

The case in point is that, simply, "x" is very different from "`x'".
In musical terms, very different things "happen" depending on 
whether you consider intension or not, even for basic "sounds", 
say, a gun shot,  To be belunt, quite different would "happen" 
depending on whether you hear this shot in a shooting range, a
movie, or your garden variety high school shooting, even if they
were identical "on tape".

Finally, as a correction: the idea of absolute music last century
does exactly *not* refer to the naive interpretation you suggest.
Quite contrarily, "absolute music" follows german idealistic 
philosophy.  Roughly, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer had promoted
music--qua its abstractness and immaterial nature--as the highest
art form and positioned it right underneath the "absolute" form of
Geist, philosophy itself.  The idea idea of "absolute music" is 
thus an expression of the desire of composers and theories in that
time to live up to these standards.  For the complete rundown on 
that topic, see Carl Dahlhaus' "The Idea of Absolute Music".