Using the perspectives of both the thought of late-18th-century English men of letters, and modern cognitive science, these volumes analyze the music as "sense formations without predication",[7] in terms of the contemporary styles and genres, and via an examination of music's relation to its "sister arts", at the same time exposing the debt owed by present-day cognitive theories to historical aesthetic ideas and artistic practices.
The book follows in detail the process whereby Western music developed into a system of signification without external reference ("a language that explains itself from within") culminating in the Classical style of the late 18th century, this as an expression of concomitant changes in intellectual and social history.
Part of these studies was conducted in collaboration with Dalia Cohen, with whom Katz founded, in the 1950s, the Laboratory for Analysis of Vocal Information at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and led jointly, producing influential methodological and theoretical breakthroughs.
A turning point in Katz & Cohen's laboratory work was the development (in the mid 1950s) of the first model of the "Jerusalem melograph",[9] an electronic apparatus transcribing orally-transmitted monophonic music as a continuous graph representing changes in pitch and loudness over time, thereby providing information that is not only precise but also independent of cultural, stylistic, and notational conventions concerning three out of the four psycho-acoustic parameters (pitch, duration and loudness; timbre was added later).
In addition to many findings concerning the particular tradition and its methodological and analytical sophistication, the book engages fundamental questions of ethnomusicology and general anthropology concerning the meaning of modal frameworks, the combination of text and music appearing as a-priori fusions, the dynamic between continuity and change in living oral traditions and the role of the individual creative artist therein, or how to assess authenticity.
Katz's other ethnomusicological research addressed inter alia the music of the Samaritans (1974), in which she identified a case of "oral group notation"' and a connection to the medieval Christian Neannoe-Ninnua, showing that both are rooted in earlier Hebrew traditions.