LAYBILLS ARE NECESSARY ONLY INSOFAR as the art they describe is not; it is as if listeners have to be distracted from the music they’re supposed to be listening to. These programs tell us that the slow drag we’re about to hear is no ordinary funeral procession but a Trauermarsch, composed in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under conditions of, usually, unremitting misery. Fill in the blank: The composer of this work suffered from insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, or suicide. Go on any night to any concert hall: You will see people looking and seeing, not hearing, and the sound they make riffling pages is often louder than the pianissimos of the slowest slow movements. These notes, so opposed to musical notation, tell us the sequence of the evening’s entertainments and their stories as well, in the tradition of nineteenth-century “program music”—music that seeks associations outside of itself, aerating aural experience through reference to nature or philosophy, to literature or the visual arts. Although some metaphors provided by these notes reflect a composer’s intention, all insist on refusing music its abstraction, on transforming its absolute, mathematical quality into the emotionally relatable, the familiarly human. [...]