Athanasius Kircher

Musurgia Universalis (1650) was one of the most widely circulated music books of the seventeenth century and remains amongst the most influential works of musicology ever. Across two enormous volumes, Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) considers everything from the anatomy of the human ear to birdsong, from new Baroque musical styles to the harmony of the spheres. This image, taken from Book IX on ‘echotectonics’ (the architecture of echoes), proposes an extraordinary ‘listening system’ in which three giant horns enable members of the Royal Court to listen-in on the piazza below. For anyone familiar with Jeremy Bentham’s famous panopticon devised a century later (1787), the similarities are striking. In both cases, the purpose is not just to surveil but to discipline: to ensure that those under surveillance understand that what they do can be seen and what they say can be heard. Already in 1650, Kircher was imagining a technique of power that, following French philosopher Peter Szendy, we might call ‘panacoustic’.

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