This is a work straddling two musical worlds - those of the atonality which was beginning to challenge the old order and those of total musical complicity, including strict counterpoint .

Instead he focuses on several topics that have occupied him for nearly four decades: "the transition from strict counterpoint in the mid-sixteenth century to the experimentation with new, freer, idioms at the beginning of the seventeenth; the search for verifiable scientific truth as a basis for music theory; the ascendancy of the power of the verbal text in musical settings; and the recovery and imitation of the musical culture of antiquity" (vii).