The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger Sarah Clemmens Waltz The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries. By Anna Maria Busse Berger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 360 + 25 halftones, 12 musical examples, 2 tables. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0226740348. The disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology currently exist in an uneasy tension as scholars begin to question what distinguishes "ethno"-musicology from the "historical" musicology developed by German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century. Busse Berger's The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries exemplifies the historical underpinnings of this tension by demonstrating the original entanglement of those disciplines through the scholarship and valuation of medieval music. The story of how (and what) music was treated in four different missions in the German East African colony (now Tanzania) connects through the foundations of German musical scholarship, contemporaneous German ideals about collective music-making, the development of scholarship and historical narrative about medieval music, and the birth of "ethnomusicology" from the old "comparative musicology." Above all, Busse Berger's examination of scholarship about and in Africa, occasionally by African scholars, suggests the way forward for a less-blinkered musicological discipline. The historiography in this examination makes it a critical read for musicologists, but the book is also very much of interest to the general humanist. Little of a technical nature intrudes except a few excurses on pentatonic (five-note) scales. German scholars' deliberate invocation of comparative linguistics in developing comparative musicology is a fascinating opening, leading to a covert throughline comparing those who claimed the Indo-European proto-language as superior to those who claimed harmony as a peculiarly Western accomplishment. We find, however, that the book's intriguing "cast of characters" (helpfully referenced in an appendix) was not uniformly motivated by evolutionist notions of culture. The work is in three parts, corresponding to the "scholars, singers, missionaries" of the subtitle. Part I explains the beginning of comparative musicology among German scholars (often of medieval music, not coincidentally) and also how the study of ethnomusicology impacted the discipline of historical musicology. Individual scholars' [End Page 159] work is investigated in detail. Their proto-ethnomusicological work provoked a number of theories now verified by medievalists if still overlooked: that medieval polyphony was most likely improvised, and that polyphony—far from being a purely Western development—existed in a global context of improvised multi-voiced music-making. Especially compelling is the chapter on Nicholas Ballanta, an African scholar born in Sierra Leone who, in the 1920s, described African music from an African perspective. Though Ballanta received the first Guggenheim for music research, his story shows how, despite great support for Ballanta's ability, Western scholarship was unprepared for his research, which was derailed by seemingly surmountable issues—various travel roadblocks, recordings he sent which were lost, leading in the end to a loss of support and inappropriately negative reviews of his research. By detailing Ballanta's publications, compositions, and arguments (for the use of African music and against the use of medieval modes and Western notation), the chapter greatly contributes to the restoration of African scholarship's role in African and African American music. Part II is about the role of group music-making, the use of medieval music, and contemporaneous comparisons to music-making in the missions in Africa as reflected in the growing communal music-making movements in Germany: the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung. These chapters re-center our image of medieval music from, perhaps, arcane esoterica toward an Arcadian realm of simplicity in the contemporary German imagination, explaining how many of those called to mission work were attracted to the idea of simple community life, which also attracted them to medieval music. A historiography of medieval musicology, including landmark performances of the 1920s, blossoms from this. Busse Berger notes that revivals of folk song, the Middle Ages, and interest in nature contributed not just to the development of musicology but to ordinary life: "It is no exaggeration to say that this movement profoundly affected every German in...