On meanings of musical meaning -- The immediacy of structural understanding -- Enlightening the listening subject -- Entertaining pleasure -- Pleasure and meaning in Haydn's Symphony in D major, no. 93 -- Old entertainments, new pleasures : meanings of late-eighteenth-century public instrumental music in contemporary American culture.

Classical music permeates modern life whether in the grocery store, on public radio, on hold on the telephone, or in traditional orchestral settings. Melanie Lowe explores why the public instrumental music of late-18th-century Europe has remained accessible, entertaining, and distinctly pleasurable to such a variety of listeners for nearly 250 years. The book is the first work of its kind to examine how concert-going listeners of the late 18th century might have responded to this new repertoire, and in what ways it was intelligible to audiences from different eras, cultures, and social settings. More broadly, she also considers the effect of Western European art music on 20th-century listeners and its meaning in contemporary culture