"For several decades, historians feel threatened by a loss of interest in history and sometimes even are threatening its institutionalized existence." In this essay, the author proposes a rich set of criteria and concepts that allow the music historian face their task beyond mere chronological inventories, which barely exceed the guidelines provided concerts and operas. This book provides a lucid discussion of the most influential in the philosophy of history, in direct relation to the particularities of the history of music concepts. So in this book involved Max Weber and the "value judgment" or considerations about the role Teodor Adorno tone music in the history of music. What is the music: a reflection of the reality that surrounds the composer or the outline of a world opposite to that reality? Are you bound by common roots with the political events and philosophical ideas? Or did the music arises from having been a former music and not because the composer moves in a world that tries to answer through music? Carl Dahlhaus offers here a highly differentiated theory of what should be a music history, showing that each of the factors to consider has undergone a complex evolution: the composer-public relationship, recreating the predominant musical sensitivity, margins of possible innovations, the social function of music, the life of the musical work well beyond the existence of the composer. This innovative and evocative analysis offers many guidelines that apply equally to also rethink the history of other arts, and aesthetics in general