AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Thursday afternoon, 12 November
AthAnAsius Kircher
David crook, university of Wisconsin-Madison, chair
The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), a Jesuit
polymath and one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century. Because of his
penchant for exaggeration and his tendency to include everything he could find on a given
topic—“no matter how strange or dubious”—Kircher’s reputation had already begun to wane
by the late seventeenth century. Recent research by historians of science and linguistics, however,
demonstrates that Kircher’s work was of critical importance to the scholarly community
of his time. In addition to publishing at least forty volumes on magnetism, optics, geology,
medicine, linguistics, Egyptology, and early medicine, Kircher corresponded with hundreds
of scholars in more than twenty languages. Situated at the leading Jesuit college in Rome, he
had unparalleled access to a global network of missionaries and researchers. A 2001 conference
devoted to Kircher drew scholars from over a dozen disciplines, including luminaries such as
Stephen Jay Gould and Anthony Grafton, in an attempt to comprehend his massive output.
Many institutions and libraries have followed with conferences, seminars, and special events
on Kircher.
While Kircher has recently begun to excite the interest of a few German and Italian music
scholars, music scholarship has not been at the center of the current Kircher revival. This is
all the more surprising given that music is one of the few disciplines that continued to be influenced
by Kircher’s writings well after his death. Kircher devoted two of his most successful
publications entirely to music, including the giant 1,200-page treatise Musurgia universalis
(Rome, 1650), an encyclopedia of music and music theory. He also timed the publication of
Musurgia (one of his longest works) to coincide with the Jubilee Year of 1650, thus ensuring
wide exposure. Hundreds of copies were distributed around the globe, making it the most
widely-distributed and influential music treatise of the seventeenth century, a treatise that
continued to be used as a primary source by musicians and scholars for over 150 years.
FATHER KIRCHER’S SINGING SLOTH (AND
OTHER WONDERS OF THE NEW WORLD)
Eric Bianchi
Yale University
Athanasius Kircher crammed his mammoth music treatise Musurgia Universalis (Rome,
1650) full with, apparently, everything he had ever heard about music. Courtesy of a fellow
Jesuit priest stationed in South America, he brought readers face to face with a marvel from
the New World: a sloth that sang—perfectly—the Guidonian hexachord. This account has
subsequently been discussed as an example of Kircher’s credulity, as well as his unparalleled
ability to amaze early modern readers with the strange, the exotic, and the novel.
The sloth was strange and exotic, but it was not novel—not even in 1650. Beginning in the
1520s, the animal was discussed, depicted, and dissected in dozens of printed sources. Not
only musicians, but also mathematicians, clerics, explorers, and natural historians weighed in
on this remarkable creature. Their accounts formed the basis of Kircher’s, despite his claims to
the contrary. Few of Father Kircher’s words were actually his own.