This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing
the field's twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process,
Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical
relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval
music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music
intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period.
Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early
twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa.
The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of
comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from
comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between
nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth
movements of the era--the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and
Singbewegung--whose focus on joint music making influenced many
musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and
Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where
missionaries--many of them musicologists and former youth-group
members--extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus
on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked
transnational connections and the role of global music in early
musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship
during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.