Early in 1920 Straube had responded to Wilibald Gurlitt concerning the latter's seminal essay in the inaugural volume of the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft on the nature and goals of musicology. Gurlitt had proposed that the musicologist's task lay not in absolute aesthetic judgments, but rather in the study of music as a cultural object, as an articulation of a particular people's engagement with its own music. He warned against the imposition of metaphysical systems and philosophical methodologies upon the historical enterprise. Drawing on a Kantian distinction, Gurlitt asked that the musicologist seek an answer “not to the quaestio juris, but to the quaestio facti; to scrutinize, not to judge; to comprehend, not to value; to justify, not to assess.” These were just the sort of ponderings that had always stoked Straube's interest in the whys and wherefores of scholarship. He replied to Gurlitt that, “in contrast to your view, I am of the opinion that only a metaphysical understanding can clarify the proper sense of the musical essence… . Perhaps it is the difficulty of the times that forces us to sum up all phenomena from an overriding, spiritual point of view.” It was a fundamental premise that the essence of the musical resided in the way it reflected the movement of Geist, the Hegelian spiritual-intellectual engine at the core of the history of ideas. History and metaphysics had to maintain a productive dialectical tension.

Not content to stop there, Straube unfurled a paradigm that would direct his thinking after the Great War. To Gurlitt he argued passionately “that western Europe constitutes a uniform culture, that the nationalities of this continent are merely increments within a much larger unity,” and that one must learn above all to recognize “the metaphysical continuities of the western European intellectual character.” He suspected that the war had issued from a blind spot in “the German mentality,” but that a sharpened grasp of European interdependence would rise from the conflict's ashes. He instructed Gurlitt that the “continuities” of which he spoke amounted to a socio-political potential with an “outer form” shaped by economic exigency and an “inner content” informed by humanist intellectual endeavor.