Music Teachers as Missionaries: Understanding Europe's Recent Dispatches to Ramallah

Abstract

In this article I address ideas underpinning the teaching of western classical music by European and North American musicians on Palestine's West Bank. I introduce the establishment and growth of this teaching movement since the mid-1990s as a product of broader international investment in the region, and suggest that it can be approached tellingly through the lens of mission. My extensive interview material has indicated ideational echoes with nineteenth-century Protestant interventions into ‘the Holy Land’, and exposed how Orientalist tropes about social difference, western music's beneficence and regional violence continue to underpin the thinking of foreign workers in the region. It has also revealed a structural similarity to earlier missionary impulses: foreign musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet—just as were nineteenth-century missionaries—they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.