Prospective readers might at first be puzzled by the book’s title: why would one search for European medieval music in Africa, at a time when the continent was being exploited by European imperialist powers? And what role did German “scholars, singers, missionaries” play in this search? The photograph on the book’s cover, showing a group of African children and youths gathered around a phonograph and listening intently to a record—presumably not of music they have performed themselves but of European music—adds further to the puzzle: in what way, one might ask, were the listeners in this photograph, as colonial subjects, implicated in this search for music from a colonial culture’s distant past?As medievalist Anna Maria Busse Berger shows in her compelling, original, and thought-provoking book, the quest for medieval music that captivated German musicologists, performers, and missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not limited geographically and intellectually to their homeland, but extended to Germany’s colonies, especially to those in Africa. In her engaging and wide-ranging narrative, the author demonstrates connections between three seemingly distinct spheres, namely those of the then emerging field of comparative musicology, participatory music movements in Germany, and the musical activities of German missionaries in East Africa between 1891 (when German East Africa officially became a colony) and 1961 (the year of Tanganyika’s independence). Accordingly, this book is not so much about East African musicians and their musics, as about the way German musicologists, musicians, and missionaries developed their own epistemologies and interpretations in their interactions with East African music cultures. It benefits not only from Busse Berger’s musicological expertise, but also from her personal experiences: as she shares in her introduction and acknowledgments, she spent two childhood years in East Africa, where her father worked as a Moravian missionary.Reflecting its threefold thematic focus, the book is structured in three distinct parts. In part 1, Busse Berger first outlines a genealogy of comparative musicology by locating its origins and objectives in nineteenth-century science (especially anthropology and anatomy) and comparative linguistics. She then presents a sequence of six short chapters on six leading figures of the discipline (Erich von Hornbostel, Marius Schneider, Georg Schünemann, Jacques Handschin, Manfred Bukofzer, and Nicholas Ballanta). Following the example of comparative linguists such as Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm von Humboldt (and much in line with a nineteenth-century Zeitgeist that favored grand narratives), comparative musicologists were concerned with nothing less than the search for music’s origins in the history of humanity. They conducted this search from a teleological perspective that positioned European music cultures as the pinnacle of an imagined cultural evolution and anticipated finding parallels between contemporary Indigenous musics—supposedly at an “earlier” stage of that evolution—and European medieval music. Sample phonographic recordings were procured in European colonies, mostly by anthropologists and missionaries. These recordings were then collected and evaluated in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv under the auspices of Hornbostel, who served as the archive’s director from 1905 to 1933. As Busse Berger succinctly shows, comparative musicologists noted several similarities between European medieval and non-European musics, such as the pentatonic nature of melodies, the use of modes, and comparative techniques of improvised polyphony.Busse Berger exposes many internal contradictions within the field’s methodologies, discourses, and findings, some of which ultimately resulted in its own demise. During the heyday of imperialism, comparative musicologists adopted a global perspective and made non-European musics a serious field of study, yet, at the same time, many scholars emphasized that such musics were not “on an equal footing” with European music and should rather be viewed as “primitive” precursors (p. 11). The discipline’s science-informed focus on classification, structural analysis, cognition, tonometrical measurements, and comparison (Carl Stumpf and Hornbostel, two of the most important early practitioners, had backgrounds in psychology and chemistry) suggests a goal of objectivity, yet, as Busse Berger compellingly demonstrates, some of the approaches and outcomes not only show a Eurocentric bias but are deeply flawed even by their own scientific standards. A case in point is Hornbostel’s universalist theory of the “blown fifth” (the Blasquintentheorie), which was later shown by his former student Bukofzer to be based on wrong measurements. Even more problematic is that some comparative musicologists engaged with anthropological methodologies based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific, racist classification systems and theories of human evolutionary descent. As Busse Berger illustrates in a short section titled “Music and Race,” ethnomusicologist Marius Schneider drew on the anthropological theory of craniology to claim that vocal timbre was linked to skull size and hereditary factors, which were presumed to be racially distinguishable characteristics. The crucially important insight that anthropology and anatomy are by no means ideologically neutral disciplines (Busse Berger somewhat casually remarks that “[r]acism in scholarship predates the arrival of the Nazis,” p. 55) would perhaps have been better laid out in the book’s introduction. This way, the author could have established a critical and rigorous framework for a more focused discussion of comparative musicology’s ties to colonialist and racist ideologies.With the exception of the West African scholar and composer Nicholas Ballanta, all the comparative musicologists portrayed by Busse Berger were European, reflecting the largely Eurocentric orientation of the field. Her excellent chapter on Ballanta is the first comprehensive account of this little-known yet immensely important figure in recent scholarship and is based on new archival findings. Ballanta, who had studied with Hornbostel, was one of the first European-trained scholars to write on African musics from an African point of view. He rejected one of comparative musicology’s core objectives, namely to compare African musics with European medieval music, positing instead that they should be analyzed on their own terms. His few published articles reveal, in Busse Berger’s words, “information about music in West Africa that cannot be found elsewhere” (p. 87). She highlights Ballanta’s significant impact on mission societies’ approach to music, which can be traced back to a talk he gave at the 1926 International Missionary Conference in Le Zoute, Belgium. In this talk he advocated for African music to be sung in churches instead of Lutheran chorales—a suggestion that many Protestant missionaries eventually put into practice.The comparatively short part 2 is devoted to two specifically German forms of participatory music making: the more leftist Jugendmusikbewegung (Youth Music Movement) and the more Christian, conservative, and nationalist Singbewegung (Singing Movement). As the author rightly notes, these movements have often been overlooked in music historiography, even though they were an important part of German music culture in the first half of the twentieth century and profoundly impacted musicologists and missionaries alike. Both were offshoots of the Wandervogel (literally, “Wandering Bird”), an influential German youth movement that originated in the late nineteenth century and “involved all social classes, all political movements, and all religious denominations” (p. 7). All three movements were united in their rejection of modernity, industrialization, capitalism, and bourgeois culture as well as their longing for a premodern past in which they saw a perfect embodiment of Gemeinschaft (community) and thus a remedy for social fragmentation and alienation. The Jugendmusikbewegung and Singbewegung practiced collective music making (such as sing-alongs, singing retreats, and Hausmusik), which involved the performance of both folk music and music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Prominent German musicologists such as Wilibald Gurlitt, Heinrich Besseler, and Friedrich Blume were deeply rooted in the Singbewegung. They were not only highly influential in their study and promotion of early music as an academic field, but also organized the first twentieth-century performances of medieval music and thus significantly contributed to the then emerging early music movement.Busse Berger’s discussion also illustrates how this participatory music culture was eventually appropriated by the Nazis. Many of the movements’ leaders became members of the Nazi party, although there were others who were persecuted because of their Jewish ancestry or dissenting political views. A more critical sociological analysis and contextualization of Gemeinschaft would have been highly useful at this juncture, since it could have shown how these participatory music movements were shaped by not only emancipatory but also authoritarian and racist ideologies; the author could perhaps have taken Adorno’s critique of the Singbewegung (which she briefly mentions) as a point of departure.The book’s third and last part finally takes the reader to East Africa and focuses largely on the activities of four different German mission societies there, three Protestant and one Catholic. Busse Berger illuminates the circulation of music-related ideas and practices in a global, colonial context. She shows how missionaries’ understanding and utilization of music in their work was shaped through their experiences with the participatory music movements in Germany and through intellectual engagement with comparative musicology; she also makes clear the importance of missionaries for the knowledge production of comparative musicologists, especially through their roles as procurers of phonographic recording data.An introductory chapter outlines the history of German mission stations in East Africa, illustrating in particular the impact of the Moravian Church and its leader Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf on German Protestant missions. The author emphasizes that Moravians were less interested in promoting Western civilization than in “saving souls” (p. 8); they were also concerned with preserving local cultures in their original form as far as possible, and undertook valuable ethnographic, linguistic, and music-related research—although it could be argued that they were trying to solve a problem to which they had contributed in the first place. More context on the role of Moravian missionaries in early European colonialism and the Atlantic slave economy would have been helpful at this point. Busse Berger writes that Moravians “lived with the African slaves” (p. 130) on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, although it would be more precise to point out that they owned African slaves and theologically justified the system of slavery, as Josef Köstlbauer, Jessica Cronshagen, and others have recently shown.1Busse Berger then compellingly discusses how missionaries in East Africa engaged with music scholarship, and how this engagement impacted their decisions about the kind of music, European or African, they used in their services. Chapters 10–13 introduce four mission societies (the Moravians, the Leipzig Mission, the Bethel Mission, and the Catholic Missionsbenediktiner St. Ottilien) and some of their leading missionaries, whose different choices and strategies are illustrated. At one end of the spectrum, the Moravian Traugott Bachmann was probably the first missionary to introduce local music and dance into worship. At the other end, Ferdinand Rietzsch, another Moravian, tried to introduce fifteenth-century European polyphony into the service of his mission, believing it was similar to the local polyphonic tradition of the Nyakyusa people that he had studied—a project that failed spectacularly due to the resistance of his parishioners. Significantly, the situation in the Catholic missions was different from that in the Protestant stations in that, at least until the Second Vatican Council, they were much more limited by church doctrine, which allowed only the use of Gregorian chant. In this part of the book, the author could have more explicitly compared German missionaries’ approaches to music with Anglo-Saxon practices: did English and American missionaries, who relied on the use of Sankey Hymns as a “colonizing force” (to use Kofi Agawu’s phrase, quoted p. 281, n. 6), share some of the Germans’ theological, ethnographic, and musical interests and goals, or was the “search for medieval music in Africa” an exclusively German phenomenon?The author briefly mentions the infamous German colonial ruler Carl Peters and discusses the complex relationship between missionaries and the German East African colonial administration. At this point, an overview of the history of German colonialism and its ideologies would have been useful for readers unfamiliar with it. In this third part of the book, as in the first two, a stronger theoretical framework (employing, for instance, the perspective of postcolonial history) and a more rigorous discussion of nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and race would have led to a more critical reading and contextualization of the material and thus strengthened the book’s main lines of argument. The narrative focus on individual biographies across the book’s three parts sheds light on personal agency in many illuminating ways, but the focus on larger themes and structures is occasionally lost.Despite these reservations, the book is immensely important for many reasons. It contributes significantly to the historiographies of ethnomusicology and musicology and illustrates how these disciplines were, in the case of Germany, sociologically and ideologically rooted in participatory youth music movements; it also shows how missionaries in East Africa contributed to the knowledge production of both fields. The author’s most original contribution lies in the way she sheds new light on the global dimension of German music history and culture. The book’s rich material and interdisciplinary scope, undergirded by meticulous archival research, will thus be of value not only for music scholars, but also for readers affiliated with German studies, theology, and missiology. Moreover, it suggests possible directions for future inquiry: for instance, the image on the cover and a similar photograph showing a group of Maasai listening to a recording of Lutheran chorales performed by the Leipzig Thomanerchor (p. 172; the author missed the opportunity to discuss these images) invite comparison with similar image types frequently found in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial music studies. It would be worth exploring the acoustemologies of such “phonographic imperialism” from the perspectives of colonizers, missionaries, and Indigenous listeners.2