Athanasius Kircher: Music, Machines, and the Marvelous

CORNELL UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 5-6, 2026 

Organized by Patricia García Gil and Laurent Ferri, this symposium explores the extraordinary sonic universe of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), the Jesuit polymath whose investigations brought together, mathematics, music, acoustics, natural philosophy, history, archeology, technology, and of course religion. Through lectures, performances, demonstrations, and an experimental “musical salon”, we will explore his fascination with fantastical instruments, music-generating machines, algorithmic composition, and music's capacity to affect the human body and emotions. From wind-activated harps and water-power organs to mechanical instruments and early systems of automated composition, Kircher's expansive conception of sound invites us to reconsider the boundaries between human, animal, natural, and machine-generated music. His work also opens conversations about cultural encounters, missionary ambitions, and the circulation of knowledge, while raising questions that resonate with contemporary debates on artificial intelligence, creativity, and musical authorship.

Laurent Ferri and Patricia Garcia Gil, Introduction

Patricia García Gil is Artist in Residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, where she integrates performance, interdisciplinary research, and teaches fortepiano and chamber music. Patricia also serves on the faculty of the Cambridge Center for International Research. A versatile and prize-winning musician, her brilliant career has already given rise to numerous concert tours throughout the world. Through her research and repertoire choices, she explores the social and cultural forces that have shaped musical history, bringing neglected voices and traditions into contemporary conversations. Recent highlights include being named “Early Music America and Early Music Seattle Emerging Artist”, performing as soloist with Ars Lyrica and the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra, being featured at the Berkeley and Bloomington Early Music Festivals, and releasing an album with the complete piano works of Pauline Viardot. She serves as Vice President of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America, and as co-chair of the DEI committee of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. Patricia co-hosts the International Fortepiano Salon, and co-directs the online resource ||:HerClassical:||

Laurent Ferri currently serves as Curator of the pre-1800 Collections in Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, aka "RMC". He is also an Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. Before joining Cornell as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2006, he was "conservateur du patrimoine" at the French National Archives (2000-5). He has more than twenty years of teaching experience, notably at the École nationale d'administration in Rabat, Morocco, at the École des chartes in Paris, and at Cornell (incl. full-semester, credit-bearing courses, plus innumerable “show and tell presentations in the RMC). In addition to having designed and co-curated nine exhibitions (at the Cornell Library, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the château de Chantilly, the Picasso Museum in Paris, the Boston Athenaeum and the Fine Arts Museum in Boca Raton), Ferri has authored three books and thirty-eight articles or book chapters. His most recent publication, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). Un savant-machine à l'ère baroque (Paris, Belles Lettres), is a 398-page anthology that explores the life, scientific reasoning, and imaginative works of the 17th-century Jesuit polymath.

Andrew Cashner, "Can Music Be Computed? Athanasius Kircher’s Arca musarithmica and the Dubious Quest to Automate Art"

Andrew Cashner is a musician, software engineer, and independent scholar in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  He holds a PhD in the history and theory of music from the University of Chicago and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University at Buffalo. His publications include the book Hearing Faith: Music as Theology in the Spanish Empire, published by Brill in 2020, two volumes of music editions with the Web Library of Seventeenth Century Music, and articles in periodicals such as Journal of Musicology, the Journal of Early Modern History, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He created the first complete software implementation of Athanasius Kircher's 1650 device for automatic music composition, the Arca musarithmica, and found the first evidence for its use in the New World; you can try it yourself at www.arca1650.info. Cashner performs regularly as a pianist, organist, vocalist, and ensemble director, and has thirty years of experience leading music for churches, including two years as Assistant Music Director at the Spiritus Christi Church in Rochester, NY. You can follow his work at www.andrewcashner.com.

Abstract: In 1650 Kircher described an analog computing device for automatically composing music, called the Arca musarithmica.  He thought he could compute music using abstract symbolic operations like algebra, because he believed that music was a manifestation of mathematical principles built into the universe by its Creator.  A software implementation of his device shows that it does work essentially as described.  Though the original device required a human operator, Kircher very nearly succeeds in his stated goal that the human should be able to operate the system solely by rule, without any knowledge of music. New archival evidence shows that it was received as such in learned circles of enthusiasts of mathematics and occult knowledge as far away as Puebla, Mexico.  While his concept of computation by rule on symbolically encoded data anticipates some of the key modern ideas of Turing machines and digital computers, his concept of composition seems more limited. Like today's AI systems that generate statistical approximations of human music, Kircher's system reveals the limits of reducing music to computable rules and highlights the tension between the noble art of programming and the more dubious programming of art.

Laurent Dubreuil, "Kircher.ai: Theory & Practice of Algorithmic Generation of Music & Poetry in the 17th Century"

Laurent Dubreuil is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences; the Director of the French Studies Program (Kircher lived and worked in Lyon and Avignon, France from 1631 to 1633, prior to moving permanently to Rome); the founding Director of the Humanities Lab; and the IWLC Senior International Chair of Transcultural Theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing (a city where several Jesuits were active and influential as mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, diplomats and music composers during Kircher’s lifetime) . The author of some fifteen scholarly books and of five literary volumes Laurent holds two PhDs, one in literature from the University of Bordeaux-3 and one in philosophy and women’s studies from Paris-8. Over the last few years, Prof. Dubreuil partook in what is now known as “public humanities,” penning articles and op-eds for the general press, especially in Les Cahiers du cinéma and Harper's Magazine, as well as for the newspapers Le Monde and The Wall Street Journal. Laurent Dubreuil’s most recent book, Humanities in the Time of AI (U of Minnesota P), an essay on the role and function of the discursive disciplines in the era of generative artificial intelligence (and Laurent was actually in Rochester two weeks ago to lecture on the subject). In parallel, Dubreuil is a principal investigator for several ongoing research efforts, all under the aegis of the Humanities Lab, most notably: a comparison between human and AI poetry (led with psychologist Morten Christiansen) on which he recently published an article in Harper’s; “Metal Machine Music”; and a project on the interrelation between language and painting in a group of bonobos, which is going to be the topic of an exhibition at Mann Library next Spring.  

Abstract: Laurent Dubreuil combined theory and AI to recreate and perform snapshots of the music “composed” by Kircher, a professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano with a fascination for mathematical algorithms. He will show that Kircher’s efforts and (half-)accomplishments in the field of “musique savante” (scholarly/pedantic music designed to systematically stimulate human emotions/affects through specific modes of composition and devices) were part of larger attempts, in the 17th century, to insert and extract combinatorial and algorithmic processes in the generation of poetry and music, from Marin Mersenne to Jean Racine, or Galileo to John Peter. This AI avant la lettre opens upquestions about the 21st century developments of the Large Language Models and their forays into artistic endeavors. 

Friday, November 6, 2026 

Kroch Library (Olin B2) 2B48 from 10:30AM-12PM 

Laurent Ferri, "A Portrait of Athanasius Kircher as a Jesuit Scholar, Teacher, Machine-Maker, Courtier, Museum Curator, Best-Selling Author — and, Possibly, Charlatan"  

Abstract: Laurent Ferri will take advantage of the comprehensive collections in the RMC to “activate/interrogate” them and show how Kircher established himself as an authority in the burgeoning fields of acoustics/sound circulation studies, music history and technology, algorithmic music, and even musicotherapy, in the very particular context of Baroque Rome, between 1634 and 1680. The author of two massive encyclopedias specifically dedicated to music, Musurgia universalis (1650) and Phonurgia Nova (1673), Kircher was also the creator of innovative musical devices, a friend of major collectors of music instruments (esp. Michele Todini), and the creator of the first museum of science and technology in the world (Galleria del Collegio Romano). While many of Kircher’s theories were already discredited during his lifetime because of his lack of rigorous methodology and absurd claims (“I looked through Kircher’s work long ago but found nothing of substance. He offers nothing but Italian-style bluster, despite being German… He’s mostly a charlatan," Descartes famously wrote), his work on music and sounds continues to attract the attention of scholars, musicians, and curators of musical instruments/museologists today. 

Carmel Raz, ‘Ossianic Sounds’: Berlioz on Memory 

Carmel Raz is an Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University, where she studies the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. Her recent book, Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2025) sheds new light on the history of music perception by focusing on music theory in the Scottish Enlightenment. Other book projects include Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, co-edited with James Grande (Cambridge University Press, 2023), The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, co-edited with Francesca Brittan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) as well as Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, a source anthology co-edited with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, which will be published by the University of Chicago's CORPUS Press as a digitally native, open-access book in 2027. 

Abstract: The Aeolian Harp was first described by Athanasius Kircher in 1650. The instrument would later capture the imagination of European Romantics and appear in poetry and music across the continent. This talk explores the afterlife of Kircher's Aeolian harp, focusing on how the French composer Hector Berlioz used the instrument as a metaphor for processes of memory. Through closely reading Berlioz's critical writing, fiction, and compositions, it examines how his depictions of the instrument reflect contemporaneous theories of sensibility, affect, and memory as represented in the literary culture of his day. It argues that the composer’s references — at once highly specific and culturally ubiquitous—were familiar symbols of late eighteenth-century sensibilité that would have continued to convey neurophysiological resonances to educated listeners. Bringing these intertextual associations to light thus helps us gain a clearer understanding of how Berlioz understood and depicted the relationship between memory and emotion in his work. 

A.D. White House at 5PM 

A Musical Wunderkammer: Kircher's Sound Universe 

Inspired by Kircher's celebrated cabinet of curiosities, this experimental musical salon brings his sonic imagination to life through performances, demonstrations, and encounters between historical instruments, mechanical devices, and contemporary technologies. Historical compositions will meet newly generated music, including experiments with Kircher's Arca musarithmica, his seventeenth-century system for algorithmic composition. A sound installation extends Kircher's world of marvels into the present, exploring natural phenomena, animal voices, cosmic harmonies, and the sounds of our technological surroundings. Together, these experiences invite audiences to question where music begins, who or what produces it, and how we listen.

Performers and speakers:

Andrew Cashner (see above); 

Annette Richards (Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Cornell Music Department, and University Organist);

David Yearsley (Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, Cornell Music Department);

Federico Ercoli (PhD Student in Music and Sound Studies, Cornell University);

Jacob Matthews (Postdoctoral Associate, Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, Cornell University);

Marcos Krieger (Professor and Director of Chapel Music at Susquehanna University);

Patricia García Gil (see above);

Roger Moseley (Associate Professor, Cornell Music Department, and Director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity. 

Annette Richards is a performer and scholar with a specialty in 18th-century German music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature and visual culture. Her most recent book The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (2022) explores cultures of portraiture, sensibility and history-writing in northern Europe, especially Germany, in the later 18th century. She is currently completing Music on the Dark Side of 1800, a project on music, touch, blindness and performance focusing again on German culture. Annette was the founding director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, and founding editor of the journal Keyboard Perspectives. She is the Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell. 

David Yearsley is the author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Bach’s Feet (Cambridge, 2012), which received the Ogasapian Book Award from the Organ Historical Society; and Sex, Death and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which was named a book of the year by the Financial Times. His Bach Laughs is forthcoming. His recordings include J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas; a musical portrait of J. S. Bach and three of his organ-playing sons; the festive virtuosic menu of Handel’s Organ Banquet; a return (with his longtime colleague, violinist Martin Davids) to Hamburg’s Golden Age of the 17th century, In the Cabinet of Wonders with Schop and Scheidemann; and several releases with the pioneering synthesizer trio, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, of which he was a member for more than two decades. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and his scholarship has also been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship at the Humboldt University and Institute for Musicological Research in Berlin, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellowship at the University of Gothenburg and the American Council of Learned Societies. For more than thirty years he was music critic for the radical rural broadsheet the Anderson Valley Advertiser and he continues to write his weekly Musical Patriot column on topics ranging from Beyoncé to Bach every Friday for CounterPunch, with more than a thousand pieces to date. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University as the Herbert Gussman Professor of Music. 

Federico Ercoli is a distinctive voice among a new generation of artists who seamlessly integrate musicological research with high-level performance. A laureate of the 2024 MA Fortepiano Competition (Brugge), Federico is equally proficient on historical and modern keyboards. His international career includes performances at the Weill Recital Hall of the Carnegie Hall, Tokyo’s KIOI Hall, the V. Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, and Brugge’s Concertgebouw. As a musicologist, he has been invited to the Bayreuth Festival as a Richard-Wagner-Stipendienstiftung scholar. Graduated at the Conservatory of Milan, Federico holds a Master’s in Musicology from the University of Pavia and a Doctor of Musical Arts and an Advanced Certificate in Early Music from the Eastman School of Music. Notably, he is the only student of this institution to twice receive the prestigious Jerald C. Graue Fellowship for excellence in musicological research. Federico’s artistry has been shaped by mentors including Malcolm Bilson, Alexander Kobrin, Paul O’Dette, and Piero Rattalino. Currently, he is Graduate Fellow at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, while pursuing a Ph.D. in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. Federico believes in the constant and integrated interaction of the highest level of musical performance and academic study, philological research, and musical aesthetic awareness, in constant original and individual artistic expression. 

Jacob Matthews is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity at Cornell University. He received his PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell and his BA in French and Francophone Studies from Columbia University. His research explores the intersection of literary theory, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and the study of language. Working across the humanities and empirical approaches to linguistic analysis, Matthews investigates how literary texts challenge and illuminate our understanding of human language processing. A central focus of his current work concerns the relationship between computational language models and human cognition, particularly how linguistic representations can help explain readers' responses to literary and poetic conventions. His research brings computational psycholinguistics into conversation with interpretive methods traditionally associated with literary scholarship. Through his work in the Milstein Program, Matthews contributes to interdisciplinary discussions about the relationships among technology, human expression, and interpretation, exploring how emerging computational methods might enrich our understanding of language and literary experience 

Marcos Krieger is a keyboard artist with extensive training in early music and early keyboard technique. His doctoral work focused on the keyboard literature of central Germany, specifically the Bach Kreis. He expanded his repertoire through further studies in Spain, Italy, and Holland, exploring the Iberian and Italian repertoire and technique for early keyboards. He has performed solo organ and harpsichord recitals in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the USA. In addition to his solo concerts, he also performs in a duo with the Italo-Swiss guitarist Donato D’Antonio, having premiered several works for organ and guitar in Europe. His musicological publications address performance issues in late Renaissance and early Baroque keyboard repertoire, treatises, and basso continuo sources. He has also published articles and book chapters on musical ekphrasis, hermeneutics, and rhetoric. He is a long-term board member of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America and serves in its publication committee, as well as in the editorial committee of the Italian journal Informazione Organistica e Organologica. Dr. Krieger is a Professor of Music at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, where he won the Don Housley Teaching Award for excellence in pedagogy. 

Roger Moseley is Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University, where he directs the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity. As a musicologist, pianist, and artistic researcher, he explores how instruments and media shape musical thought, experience, and imagination by bringing historical scholarship into dialogue with performance, improvisation, composition, and media theory. 

Moseley holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in collaborative piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (University of California Press, 2016), received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award in 2017. His other publications address subjects ranging from Brahms, Chopin, and Mozart to historical improvisation, media archaeology, and digital games. At Cornell, Moseley’s research and teaching draw on the Center for Historical Keyboards’ instruments to investigate relationships among touch, technique, listening, and historical imagination. He regularly performs on historical pianos as well as electronic and digital keyboards. He also co-directs the Chamber Music Collective, a summer program devoted to historical instruments and performance practices. Moseley’s current book project, Resonant Artifacts, traces the musical afterlives of the Romantic piano through studies of Schubert, Chopin, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional musician Johannes Kreisler. It asks how music becomes recognizable across changing instruments, bodies, inscriptions, and circumstances, and how acts of preservation might also be understood as acts of transformation.