This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By the time Salomone Rossi turned to Hebrew liturgical composition, he had spent decades as a working court musician for the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua, writing madrigals and instrumental sonatas in exactly the same contrapuntal idiom Claudio Monteverdi, his colleague at the same court, was using to help invent the Baroque style. Hashirim Asher LiShlomo takes that idiom, unchanged, and points it at the synagogue: thirty three settings of psalms, hymns and prayers for the Sabbath and holiday liturgy, written for three to eight voices with none of the melodic material borrowed from any inherited cantorial chant. Rossi composed as himself, not in a separate "Jewish" musical language.
That was not a small step. Polyphonic art music inside the synagogue was a genuine halakhic question in Rossi's day, not a matter of taste, and the collection's front matter carries the answer: a preface and formal halachic ruling by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh (Leon) of Modena, a Venetian rabbi, theologian and musician himself, defending composed polyphony's suitability for worship on the strength of biblical precedent for elaborate musical praise. Without that ruling standing publicly beside the music, Rossi's settings would have had no institutional path into an actual service.
The result, printed in Venice by Pietro and Lorenzo Bragadini, is counted as the earliest known published collection of polyphonic settings of the Hebrew liturgy anywhere, a genuine first rather than an early example. It is also, within this atlas's own collection of religious musical works, a different kind of entry from most of what stands beside it: not a later composer's account of scripture or ritual observed from outside, but a member of the community that prays the words writing the music meant to carry them.