Not unlike a compiler of a dictionary, an editor of an anthology may easily become haunted by the feeling that the more he gathers in, the more material still remains outside his grasp. Any period of intellectual history, if it is to be documented exhaustively and meaningfully, requires that attention be paid to a variety of personalities and works and not only to the thought of the most distinguished intellectual lights of the time. Numerous lesser figures who often voiced short-lived though urgent concerns of a small intellectual community, followers of a belief, belligerents in critical disputes – all should have their say. Such a complexity of critical and philosophical themes is easy to recognize in any age but is exceedingly difficult to document. It may therefore sound like a veiled admission of defeat if at the outset I say that it is not the aim of this volume to paint a complete picture, but rather to offer a representative sample of some of the main tendencies in the aesthetics of music during the second half of the nineteenth century.

In chronological terms the volume succeeds Peter le Huray's and James Day's Music and aesthetics in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The accent is on the material from the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade or so of the twentieth century which in its themes and concerns still belongs to the intellectual currents of the preceding one.