If you’re allergic to highly technical program notes for classical music concerts, you’re not alone. Most musicians I know find such notes boring and irrelevant, and most non-musicians find them useless, not to mention seriously off-putting. Well, it turns out it’s an old problem, as I discovered when I read a wonderful essay by George Bernard Shaw from 1896. “[Thirty years ago],” Shaw wrote, “the average programmist would unblushingly write, ‘Here the composer, by one of those licenses [which