The aim of this study has categorically not been simply to set up and resolve various components of the ‘Bruckner problem’ one after the other, as if these problems, and in fact those accruing to the life and work of any composer, simply dissolve under interdisciplinary scrutiny. Neither has it been to assert that such matters are in all cases irremediable except from an interdisciplinary, or broadly critical, perspective. Rather, it has been to point out the benefit to our understanding of Bruckner's symphonies of allowing them to act as the focus for a variety of methodological debates. This responds to a fundamental tendency to perceive contentious issues as methodologically self-contained: the idea that editorial and textual dilemmas demand exclusively philological solutions, or that biographical clichés will disperse if the appropriate biographical evidence is marshalled. It may, instead, be productive to view such problems as points of disciplinary convergence: editorial disagreements arise as much from analytical perceptions or from trends in reception history as they do from textual difficulties; biography becomes entangled in hermeneutic, analytical or historical agendas.

Developing this approach has involved maintaining a dual perspective. On the one hand, wide-ranging methodological debates have been engaged as vehicles for conceptualising Bruckner's music.