The 20th-Century notion of "absolute music" tended to capture the imaginations of composers who wanted to be thought "modern". They generally abandoned the emotional, descriptive and/or narrative ambitions of 19th-Century program music in favor of a more severe system of abstraction. This marked the end of concert music as a popular art form but not the end of program music, which went on its merry way in movies, where it continued to enthrall a large public.
Of course, people didn't pay as much conscious attention to this music as they used to in the concert hall, but they could have, with profit. To prove this assertion all you have to do is listen to the many classic film scores now available on CD -- the original tracks recorded for the films or later re-recordings of the scores. Many of them are magnificent pieces of music in their own right. It helps to have the "program" in mind, a memory of the films this music supported, but it's not absolutely necessary with the very best scores -- like those of Bernard Herrmann, for example.
Hermann didn't specialize in creating memorable melodies but he was a master at using the colors of an orchestra to evoke mood and he had a great and subtle understanding of the dramatic uses of rhythm. All of his Hitchcock scores are brilliant, even the less famous of them like the score he did for The Wrong Man. Edgy, dark, minimalist, jazz-inflected, it perfectly mirrors the bleak and jagged realism of Hitchcock's 50s-era New York City, its dehumanizing institutions and its spiritual chaos. But it has a lyrical core, too, that echoes the protagonist's yearning for deliverance.
It's not absolute music, to be sure -- but it's absolutely wonderful.