The translations in chapters 6 and 7 of this reader are from Bruckner, vol. I, part 2 (“The dynamics of form”), chapter 2 (“The Symphonic Wave”). Part 1 provides the cultural background for the composer's work, and includes a psychoanalytically oriented biography. For Kurth, Bruckner was a mystic, whose personal and creative tensions combined to produce a music shaped by dynamic processes. These Kurth expounds theoretically in part 2, chapter 1 (“Bruckner's formal principle”). In the ensuing chapters he then illustrates analytically various facets of the process, starting in chapter 2 with some basic traits of “wave dynamics” (Wellendynamik), such as wave initiation and dissipation; reverberatory waves; the illusion of symphonic “space”; dynamically determined motivic transformations; and the organicism in wave structure. Most of the musical examples are relatively brief, the longest being the openings of the first and last movements of the Sixth Symphony. Kurth discusses these longer passages in short segments, the goal being to show how Bruckner hierarchically builds the overriding continuity and dynamic logic from short segments.

Readers should keep in mind that some of Kurth's analytical commentary depends on first-edition scores that are now considered obsolete. Analytical statements that rely on unauthentic orchestration, registration, dynamics, and phrasing, for example, may not hold up in light of modern editions of the symphonies. Although certain of Kurth's analytical statements may no longer be fully supportable, his idea of dynamic form, and the musical criteria employed to illustrate it, are nevertheless significant and remain valid in principle.