Tovey employed the image of a building (in regard to tonality) but made the valuable point that one never really sees all of a building at once (1941: 103). This 'fourth-leg syndrome', where one cannot see all of the table's legs at the same time, is a healthy reminder that our view is only partial in both senses (meaning optically incomplete and personally biased). Yet it is often averred that more 'words' will help to make visible that which is hidden. Many composers find pre-concert talks to be helpful (e.g. Maxwell Davies in Palmer 2015: 331), but these are necessarily 'accessories before the fact'. Hewett's assertion that every composers' music nowadays requires "some degree of explication" (2005: 106) fails to see that musical text has never been completely sovereign and always needs some decoding. Indeed, what folk often term 'classic' (in music or art) is a magic porridge pot whose explication evades exhaustive searches to map it. Calvino puts it neatly (1999: 5) when he says that reading a classic articulates something that we have always sensed yet, equally, constantly manages to surprise us on re-reading. It would thus also be viable to propose the idea of a philosophical Nurtext (only-text) which is the composer's vision or conception of his piece that might or might not be coterminous with the pretext, but which is unrealised.
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Mahler thought that programmes such as poems could function as scaffolding for music, which could then be removed without destroying the construction (in de la Grange 1973: 357). The sheer colour of, say, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel (1895) is arguably sufficient to carry the listener through the music without too much knowledge of the details in the story it depicts. Schumann, though, in 1843 was suspicious of a musical programme as being a crutch to the music: "first show me that you can make beautiful music; after that I may well like your programme" (in Pleasants ed. 1965: 184), but it is simplistic to see music simply as the sound it makes. Aside from the more obvious issue that music is often performed in a deliberate context (with a large visual component), some music relies on the expectations of the sound presented, such as Debussy's La Mer (1905) or Bax's Tintagel (1919), for example, which are pieces with titles that cannot but help trying to tell us something.
The context of performance is part of the music even if it does not involve dots on staff notation, and it is not surprising that performing musicians play with this. A word, though, is needed to describe this, and so I develop the idea of the 'hearingness' of a piece. This refers to the overall sonic image created (of which the notes on the score and their sounding out loud is an important component), and has some precedent in Ingarden's work which dates from 1966. In a chapter entitled The sounding and nonsounding elements and
moments of a musical work, he discusses Höreraum (1986: 91) as the properties of the venue in
which music is made, helping to amplify the point that the sheer notes of a score are not the whole story. (A clear example is a composer considering the effects of the 8-second reverberation of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, as part of a work for that place.)
Composers do not always agree on how performance conditions affect music. Two divergent opinions (from composers Mendelssohn and Mahler) about the optimum performance conditions have seemingly nothing to do with the sounds depicted in the score. In what he calls the interests of musical unity, Mendelssohn asks for his Scottish Symphony (1842) to be performed without long breaks (in Eulenburg score 1999: xxviiii). It is also worth noting that the work initially had no Caledonian programmatic tag, being first presented as Symphony in A minor (Todd 2003: 431). Mahler, by reverse, wishes (in Inbal's Mahler box-set for Denon 2003: 6) a 5-minute gap between the first and second
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movements of his Symphony No. 2 (1896) so that the audience may digest it better. Intriguingly, it is the second movement's 'out-of-place-ness' which marks it out as an interpolation that becomes helpful in articulating the work's overall construction. And while this period of 5 minutes of silence (or, better, 'non-soundedness') is not the same as the 5 minutes in Cage's 1952 work 4'33"—one is reflective the other performed—both do rely on a public context. Richard Ayres's 2002 NONcerto (for Horn and Orchestra), requires the soloist to also be an athlete dashing from one side of the stage to another, and while the 'music' in sound-terms may not be affected much, he is exploring the limits of musical capacity, since the breathing (and sound) may well result in a different sound. The physicality creates a sense of the stretching the limits of human capacity, and one might, for instance, even say that running the 100 metres is a 'concerto' for human, albeit with little musical content. Mendelssohn, further, wittily plays with the idea of movement divisions (complete with applause-expectation) in the E minor Violin Concerto (1844) by leaving the Bassoon playing a long held note at the end of the first movement. The standard applause which the 'notes' would normally provoke is inappropriate, and thus the audience's contribution to the work is toyed with, proving its integrity to the work's text.