AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Thursday afternoon 29
Starting from Kircher’s discussions of the singing sloth and the Guidonian hexachord,
I reconstruct a largely forgotten world of seventeenth-century erudition, and suggest what
place music scholarship had in it. With particular attention to visual images from early modern
books, I suggest how and why Kircher fashioned his account and image as he did—and
why they appeared in a music treatise at all. In that age of polymaths, music scholarship was
not solely the domain of musicians, nor was it necessarily written for them. Even at his most
extreme, the famously digressive Kircher (best known in his day as a mathematician, linguist,
and Egyptologist) may be more representative than is generally supposed.
Kircher was drawn to the sloth by more than his love for the exotic. As the self-anointed
Christian Pliny, he saw himself continuing the comprehensive natural history that the pagan
Roman had begun. As the most famous professor at the Catholic world’s leading educational
institution (the Collegio Romano), he was expected to rehabilitate the image of Catholic
scholarship and science in the wake of Galileo’s condemnation. He was fascinated by Guido
of Arezzo, who emerges in Musurgia as a Catholic superhero: a devout cleric who devised
the hexachord, invented polyphony, notation, and even keyboard instruments. Guido and
his hexachord were the perfect emblems for Kircher’s larger intellectual project: a sacred science
that demonstrated the unity of all things and the universality of the Catholic Church.
But what had fascinated seventeenth-century readers seemed unscholarly and unscientific to
music scholars of the eighteenth century, who responded to Musurgia with skepticism and
derision.
FATHER KIRCHER’S MIRACULOUS MECHANICAL
MUSIC-MAKING METHOD
John Z. McKay
Harvard University
Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) is—as the title suggests—a treatise on “universal
music-making.” Previous studies have emphasized the universal and musical aspects of
Kircher’s writing, both within his specific discussions of the Harmony of the Spheres and as a
reflection of the larger project of a 1200-page encyclopedia of seventeenth-century music. Few,
however, have ventured into his detailed instructions on the making of music. This trend is
in part the fault of a more accessible 1662 German translation, which left out over two-thirds
of Kircher’s original Latin text. The translation retained brief discussions of philosophical and
magical elements of music that bookend the treatise, but vast sections of practical theory and
instructions for music-making that make up the bulk of the text were completely omitted.
Among the missing portions is a 200-page description, located near the end of the treatise, of
an automatic method for composition that Kircher identifies in his preface as the culmination
of much of the work that precedes it. By considering the purpose, sources, and output of this
compositional algorithm, my paper reevaluates Musurgia’s practical goals in the light of new
evidence that challenges the accepted view of Kircher’s place within the world of seventeenthcentury
music and music theory.
Drawing on theoretical discussions of the ars combinatoria from Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle
(1636), Kircher proposes a more workable method for generating musical settings.
Dozens of complex tables provide the raw musical material for four-part settings in seventeenth-century
counterpoint. Unlike later eighteenth-century dice games that usually limit
themselves to short compositions with a preset number of measures, Kircher has a much