This volume, in the series Cambridge Readings in the Literature of
Music, is an anthology of original German, French and English writings
from the period 1851-1912. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century music continued to be a subject to which philosophers,
psychologists, scientists and critics repeatedly addressed themselves.
Some of the philosophical approaches followed the tradition of the
German speculative philosophy of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Elsewhere the new 'scientific' climate of the
nineteenth century left its mark on the work of scientists and
psychologists interested in the impact of acoustical stimuli on the
human mind or in the role of music and song in the prehistory of
mankind.