At the announcement last week of the concerts and recitals programme for this year's Edinburgh International Festival, several things caught my eye, particularly the number of orchestral works on the programme which are "about" something, whether they have a story to tell or, pictorially, scenes to evoke and images to conjure.

That starts on night one, with Donald Runnicles and the BBC SSO playing Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) where we can hear the hero (Strauss himself, of course) depicting his life through his great deeds and triumphs, his battles with adversaries (the critics), his love life and his reflections on his own praiseworthy enterprises.

And we can hear Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his fabulous Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique bringing to life the great scenes of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, with its stylish then whirling waltz at a ball, its outdoor pastoral evocations, its March To The Scaffold with the head-chopping slice of the guillotine, the thud of the severed head clunking down into the basket, and its wild Witches' Dance.

I could go on all day like this, chucking Stravinsky's Petrushka with the Philharmonia, Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter, and both Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin and Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring with Gergiev and the LSO into the festival's pictorial pot.

At this early stage of the year, I have absolutely no idea what, if any, of this lot I might hear, but the concentration of all these pieces into one short period does throw a focus on a perennial issue that many music lovers face: how should we listen to such music? Is it important that we, as listeners, should be aware of the narrative background to a composition before we sit down to hear it? I've been asked that question many times by many listeners over the years; and if you're going to take the question seriously, there is no simple answer, no 'one-size-fits-all' response. And that is the absolute core of the issue as far as I'm concerned.

If there is a text, whether sung or spoken, in a composition, then that is entirely a different ball game, which throws a completely different perspective on how we approach the music. But none of the pieces above has a text along with the music. Images suggested by the composer, yes; pictorial or other subtitles, yes. But no matter how explicit or indeed helpful they might be to any individual, they do not and cannot either determine or govern how we as listeners will approach or listen to that piece of music.

Put aside your programme note with its (hopefully) helpful historical background and navigation tips. Look up. There is not a text in sight (unless they have projected supertitles above the stage).

In every one of these pieces, what you are hearing and listening to is abstract orchestral music. It has shape, it has a sonic architecture, it has a sense of direction, a feeling of momentum, and of course it will have colour; it will have a magical palette of dynamics, it will variously accelerate and decelerate; it will accumulate and thin out. It might make you gasp in wonder. It might make you laugh. It might make you cry. It might make your neighbours in the row do all of these things; or none of them. It might indeed leave them indifferent.

Each of us responds and reacts in different ways to music. That's the way music works. You dare not generalise. You might have a 100-strong super-virtuoso orchestra in front of you, playing their socks off. You might be blown away by what they do. But you cannot dictate that any other person must react in the same way.

And similarly, if you find it useful or helpful to know precisely what the narrative background to a piece is, then that's good news for you; but neither you nor anyone else - be it the composer, the programme note writer, me, indeed the musician giving the performance, or any of your peers or acquaintances - can instruct or insist that anyone else should have this in mind as they listen.

At the end of the day, or, rather, at the start of the concert, it's just you and the music. And it's only "about" that particular encounter. Last year I listened as violinist Edward Dusinberre, leader of the Takacs Quartet, spoke for six or seven minutes from his chair before playing. He related, in minute detail, the background story to Janacek's First String Quartet, subtitled The Kreutzer Sonata. It was highly entertaining and very well told. But it didn't lead me any further into the great quartet, and told me nothing about Janacek's unique and distinctive means of fashioning and building his music. Beware narratives promising enlightenment.