Józef Koffler graduated in musicology from the University of Vienna, where he studied, among others, with Guido Adler (who also supervised his doctoral dissertation). Adler was one of the founders of that discipline, and it was he who divided musicology into historical and systematic. Both fields were equally important for him (cf. G. Adler, ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, I, 1885).

Koffler dedicates relatively little space to the period before 1800 in his publications. In his ‘Compendium of Music History’ (Muzyk Wojskowy) he presents a survey of music history since ancient Greece. This includes, apart from general, also Polish music history.

Koffler aptly compares the ca-1900 breakthrough in music to the one that took place in the Florentine circles three hundred years before (with the emergence of dramma per musica), ‘though one may not grant impressionism an importance comparable to that of the Renaissance, from either the absolute or developmental perspective’ (‘A Survey of Music History’, Muzyk Wojskowy 2, 15 Jan. 1928, 7–8).

Current music life in interwar Poland, discussed mostly from the perspective of the city of Lwów, was a major topic for Koffler the journalist. Musical activity in Poland, he concludes in 1934, has never been an expression of social culture at large. Instead, it was a local phenomenon centred on just a few cities that boasted musical traditions (Lwów being one of them).

Koffler assigns two functions to music education: 1) building general love of and knowledge about music, 2) professional training. The former category involves bringing up consumers of music (‘an environment characterised by a high level of musical culture’), whereas the latter aims at educating producers (composers and performers).