This is the first publication to provide extensive annotated translations from the writings of the music theorist Ernst Kurth (1886-1946), who wrote three pioneering studies on the music of J.S. Bach, Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner. The book will familiarize today's English-speaking scholars with Kurth's theoretical ideas and innovative analytical strategies through his commentaries on the passages from these composers. An extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural background required for understanding Kurth's work.

The writings of Sulzer and Koch represent a significant confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch creatively adapted many of Sulzer's abstract philosophical ideas to concrete questions of musical pedagogy, showing how they could be usefully applied to the teaching and analysis of musical composition. This collaborative study and translation of the texts will be of interest to all historians of music, music theory, and historians of eighteenth-century German aesthetic thought.