Kirchmeyer’s body of work was profoundly shaped by subject-specific bibliographic, philological, and juridical methodologies. With his 1958 monograph on Stravinsky, which emerged from his unpublished doctoral dissertation, he achieved a level of commercial success unusual for a musicological publication, bringing him sudden fame (cf. Ernst Kaufmann: Ein großes Buch und sein Echo, Jeunesses musicales – Musikalische Jugend, June 1959 issue, p. 6).
In this work, he pioneered the use of journalistic literature—previously shunned in musicology—as a primary source. In the appendix’s catalogue of works, he combined monographic and biographical elements into a novel method he termed ergography. Kirchmeyer further developed both the contemporary historical and ergographic methods into what he—strongly influenced by Karl Jaspers—termed situational history. This approach reconstructs history as a mosaic-like assembly of documented, immediate contemporary diagnoses of the smallest temporal events, the reliability of which must be determined using forensic methods.
The resulting historical tableau interprets music history as a logical sequence of micro-situations. As experts have judged, this method, when correctly applied, renders polemical or apologetic interpretations of specific events or individual artworks obsolete. Kirchmeyer’s 1972 book on Wagner was produced using this methodology and became another success, establishing Kirchmeyer among the significant contemporary Wagner scholars.
At the behest of his patron Dr. Ernst Coenen, and following years of archival research, he compiled all articles regarding Richard Wagner published in German newspapers and periodicals between 1842 and 1861. These are being progressively published in dedicated documentary volumes (to date, four volumes covering the period 1842–1852).
Concurrently, a complete collection of all German-language foundational articles on the systematic history of music criticism (three volumes covering 1791–1852) was published. For the preface of this collection, Kirchmeyer wrote the initial account of the methodological history of German-language music criticism, which was pre-published by Wolfgang Wagner in the Parsifal booklet of the 1988 Bayreuth Festival. Kirchmeyer viewed these works as a measure of securing the foundations of media studies.
Kirchmeyer was significantly influenced by the methods of music ethnographer Marius Schneider, Germanist Richard Alewyn, and above all, legal historian Viktor Achter, to whom he dedicated one of his documentary volumes. Kirchmeyer, whose “passionate dedication and ascetic incorruptibility” were once attested to by a specialist journal, strongly championed contemporary composers. Independent of professional encounters, he maintained personal ties with Jürg Baur, Herbert Eimert, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
He held the first lecture series at a German university on post-1945 music and the first seminar on Stockhausen. Herbert Eimert, the founder of the first Studio for Electronic Music who died in 1972, appointed him by will as the heir to his epistolary estate (comprising approximately 400 items). Kirchmeyer is currently occupied with continuing the Wagner documentation for the years 1853 and 1854, as well as completing his memoirs covering his tenure as a university administrator from 1972 to 1995.