Worth the price of the Musurgia universalis: Athanasius Kircher on the secret of the “metabolic style”

Towards the culmination of the first volume of the Musurgia universalis, Athanasius Kircher pledged to make the hefty price of his treatise worthwhile by divulging a secret “metabolic style” practiced by Carlo Gesualdo, Domenico Mazzocchi, and other “masters”.  While the so-called metabolic style has long been a source of fascination for music historians and theorists, Kircher’s writing has only recently been critiqued in detail.  In the most penetrating studies to date, both Patrizio Barbieri and Martin Kirnbauer agree in defining the metabolic style as the concurrent mutation of mode, transposition of final, and variation of species (diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic); a chromatic or enharmonic instrument is presumed, on account of the metabolic style’s vast gamut.  This study proposes an alternate reading of Kircher’s Musurgia universalis, through which I argue that some music included under the rubric of the metabolic style was also conceived and intended to be performed with common-practice (non-extended) mean-tone tempered instruments.  In contrast to the theoretical composers of metabolic music, who were inspired by the humanist research of Giambattista Doni, practitioners employed out of tune mean-tone sonorities as text-setting devices.  These sonorities were one of the secrets of the metabolic style that Kircher sought to unlock for his readers.  To support my argument, this study unfolds in several subsections, in which I not only provide close-readings of Kircher’s intricate prose, but also point out agreements and disagreements between Barbieri, Kirnbauer, and myself.  I first re-critique Kircher’s writing on enharmonicism “ab Authore intento”, evincing how he reported that musicians were substituting flats for sharps and vice versa in mean-tone temperament, while retaining an acoustically imprecise notation.  Concordances to this practice are sought out and found in the writings of Scipione Stella (from the Gesualdo circle) and Doni.  This out of tune enharmonic practice is exemplified in Kircher’s chosen examples from the works of Domenico Mazzocchi and Galeazzo Sabbatini.  I emphasize in particular the discrepancies between Kircher’s and Mazzocchi’s divisions of the whole-tone and, perhaps most unexpectedly, between Sabbatini’s enharmonic music and enharmonic keyboard.  Once the practitioners’ enharmonic intervals are exposed, they are then readily incorporated into the metabolic style, as exemplified by Kircher.  In addition to re-critiquing Kircher’s chosen examples, I divulge that Kircher’s chapter on the metabolic style betrays an indebtedness to Gioseffo Zarlino, who may be credited with the inception of the metabolic style—and not, as hitherto presumed, Doni.  Ultimately, this study encourages new historically informed performances of the prized chromatic and enharmonic music of Gesualdo, Mazzocchi, Michelangelo Rossi, and others, to better recreate the sounds heard in the mid-seventeenth century Barberini academy in Rome.  Although the chapter on the metabolic style in the Musurgia universalis is deficient in many ways, Kircher, no matter his self-acknowledged limitations, effectively publicized a form of musica reservata and left us the key to unlock its mysterious workings.