http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=F60ECBA59D48F1AAD30DDC33A9940366
>Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch
original here http://www.zeno.org/Kategorien/T/Sulzer-1771
>Sulzers aesthetic theory possesses a fundamentally conservative core, however progressive it may have feigned to be with its patina of empirical psychology. His concern with the moral value of art and its pedagogical potential for promoting personal as well as civil virtue was comparable in conviction only with Shaftesbury.
>C. G. Neefe declared that Sulzer had proved himself to be one of the greatest philosophers and aestheticians of their time. Kant, too, had warm words of praise for Sulzer's work, finding it one of the most thoughtful studies ever written on the artistic imagination. Herder was particularly impressed by Sulzer's penetrating insights and systematic analysis of psychological faculties in relation to the creation and perception of art. Yet Herder also found fault with its pedantic and moralizing tone. It was in general much too abstract and prescriptive, he was forced to admit, with too little attention paid to the actual history of art. The young Goethe had much the same complaint. Goethe chastized Sulzer for thinking he could penetrate the mysteries of artistic creation from the perspective of a detached philosopher. Dry theoretical generalizations and optimistic moralisms could never begin to convey the true spiritual meaning and power of art. Besides for Goethe, nature was not the benevolent force of virtue Sulzer assumed; it could just as well be violent and cruel, deaf to the suffering of humanity.
>Despite the negative reaction of the young Stürmer und Dränger, Sulzer's encyclopedia was highly influential as a reference work, often cited by authors and used as a learning text well into the nineteenth century. It was the largest and most encyclopedic attempt made in the German language during the eighteenth century to define and codify systematically all aspects of the arts, and to draw out common aesthetic principles in a useful, didactic manner.
>all its suggestiveness, his prescriptive process would probably have remained an abstraction for musical composition were it not for the efforts of Koch, since it was Koch who was able creatively to adapt Sulzer's aesthetic and rhetorical ideals to concrete problems of musical composition.