Abstract
In his >Musurgia universalis<, published 1650, Athanasius Kircher characterized music as »discors concordia vel concors discordia«. By reinterpreting the traditional functions of consonances and dissonances in a composition, he used this definition for an original model for a state with cultural and religious diversity which should especially match the situation of the Habsburg empire after the peace of Westfalia. The present text, on the one hand, discusses Kircher's new accentuation of musical metaphors for politics. One the other hand it identifies possible roots of this notion in the history of ideas, mentioning the cosmology of Neo-Platonism, world models like magic and love, religious debates of Cusanus and Ramon Llull, Ficino's concept of beauty, harmony, and varietas, and finally the political philosophy of the Renaissance and its echo in musical emblems.
