Resonating across an Anglican-Xhosa mission soundscape: a case study of instruments, bells, and processions

Abstract

ABSTRACT What might the study of soundscapes bring to postcolonial understandings of past musical practices? In this article, I explore this question with reference to archives documenting that nineteenth-century mission activities are full of auditory information. Accounts of hymn singing, printed artefacts, and methods of musical pedagogy are a few examples of the evidence we find in the mission archive that indicates the part that music and sound played in the life of mission stations around the world. This evidence raises critical questions about the ways in which the soundscape featured in the encounter between missionaries and Indigenous peoples. For instance, how did Indigenous people interpret and refashion musical forms introduced by missionaries? And how did Indigenous musicality and understandings of sounds impact the musical culture of missions? I address these and other questions by examining three key elements of the soundscape—instruments, bells, and processions—found on the Anglican-Xhosa missions, established in the Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1855, in an attempt to articulate how music and sound mediated religious experience, and how this experience was contested by missionaries and Indigenous peoples.