[Mus. 77.2 Excerpt from Musurgia Universalis]
Call Number: Birnbaum Collection Mus. 77.2
Attribution: Kircher, Athanasius; Reuchlin, Johann.
Place: Unknown
Date: Unknown
Physical Description: 1 leaf; 34 x 25 cm ; manuscript.
Subject: Secular music, choral music, extramusical material
Description:
Part of a subcollection on Neginoth or te’amim that Birnbaum had numbered “Mus. 77.” Some of these items in this subcollection have been long missing, including in a note as of 1979, when Israel Adler was working on collection. As Adler notes, these items are “probably located in other parts of the collection, such as Arch II 40 H.”
In the Planer catalogue, he erroneously claims that this should be attributed to Kirchner (and that attribution to Kircher was a mistake). However, this item is in actuality an excerpt from Athanasisus Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis. This text was a dictionary of music and musicians written by a Jesuit father in Rome (1650), and was later translated into German.
Includes a four-part choral in Hypodorian mode with a non-liturgical text in Hebrew, and a melody for one voice entitled “Melothesia Arabica recto ordine cantobilis, in Basi exhibita.”
On the reverse, there is four-part harmonization of te’amim, which is labelled “Reuchlin,” (likely alluding to German scholar Johann Reuchlin) in blue ink. C.f. Mus. 77.5.