The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries

THE SEARCH FOR MEDIEVAL MUSIC IN AFRICA AND GERMANY, 1891–1961

NEW MATERIAL HISTORIES OF MUSIC

A series edited by James Q. Davies and Nicholas Mathew

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THE SEARCH FOR MEDIEVAL MUSIC IN AFRICA AND GERMANY, 1891–1961

Scholars, Singers, Missionaries

ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74034-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74048-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226740485.001.0001

This book has been supported by the Martin Picker Endowment and Publications Endowment of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It has also been supported by a publication grant from the University of California, Davis.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Berger, Anna Maria Busse, author.

Title: The search for medieval music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961 : scholars, singers, missionaries / Anna Maria Busse Berger.

Other titles: New material histories of music.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: New material histories of music | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020013472 | ISBN 9780226740348 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226740485 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Musicology—Germany—History. | Mission music—German East Africa—History and criticism. | Missions—German East Africa—History—20th century. | Ethnomusicology—Germany—History. | Ethnomusicology—German East Africa—History. | Musicologists—Germany. | Music—15th century—History and criticism. | Medievalism—Germany. | Music—Social aspects—Germany. | Music and youth—Germany—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML3797.2.G47 B47 2020 | DDC 780.72/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013472

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

Joseph Busse (1907–1972)

Erika Busse (1910–2003)

and my sisters

Katharina Peters-Rellensmann *1937 in Mbeya

Luise Böß *1939 in Rungwe

Dorothea Woydack *1950 in Hamburg

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

Part I: The Search for the Origins of Music: Comparative Musicology

1. Comparative Musicology and Comparative Linguistics

The Indo-Europeanists

Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Beginnings of Anthropology

2. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel

Life

Research

3. Marius Schneider

Life

Scholarship

Music and Race

4. Georg Schünemann

Life

Scholarship

5. Two Crossover Musicologists: Jacques Handschin and Manfred Bukofzer

Lives

The Attraction of Comparative Musicology for Handschin and Bukofzer

The Undermining of Comparative Musicology

6. Nicholas G. J. Ballanta

Life

Research

Part II: Bringing Medieval Music to Life: Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung

7. The First Performances of Medieval Music and the Historians Behind Them

The Performances in Karlsruhe (1922) and Hamburg (1924)

Friedrich Ludwig

Wilibald Gurlitt

Rudolf von Ficker

Heinrich Besseler, Medieval Music, and Gemeinschaftsmusik

8. The Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung: Ideology, Leaders, and Publishers

The Wandervogel

The Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung, the Leaders, and the Publishers

The Movements in Theory and Practice

Part III: Music in the German Mission Stations in East Africa: Some Case Studies

9. A History of the Missions

The Moravians

Gustav Warneck and the Volkskirche

10. The Moravians

Traugott Bachmann

Franz Ferdinand Rietzsch

11. The Leipzig Mission

Bruno Gutmann and the Leipzig Missionaries

Chagga Church Music in the First Years

The Chagga Hymnbooks

Gutmann, Folklore, and Gemeinschaft

Gutmann and Singbewegung

12. The Bethel Mission

Beginnings

Missionary Activities

Mission Inspector Walther Trittelvitz

Ballanta’s Influence on the Music in the Mission Stations

Otto Hagena

Postlude

13. The Catholic Missionsbenediktiner St. Ottilien

Motu proprio

Catholic Perceptions of the Evolution of African Music

Coelestin Vivell

Cassian Spiess

Clemens Künster

Meinulf Küsters

Johann Baptist Wolf

Stephan Mbunga

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Cast of Characters

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

Figure 2.1. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Jacques Handschin in front of the Berlin castle. Courtesy of Allard Pierson, Universiteit van Amsterdam, collectie Jaap Kunst, foto 164.034.

Figure 3.1. Marius Schneider. From Bleibinger, Marius Schneider und der Simbolismo, 393.

Figure 4.1. Georg Schünemann (center) recording prisoners of war (1915–18), Carl Stumpf (right) in Frankfurt an der Oder. Courtesy of Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.

Figure 5.1. Manfred Bukofzer. Courtesy of Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 6.1. Nicholas G. J. Ballanta (second from left), in Sierra Leone, no date. Courtesy of Dyke Kiel.

Figure 6.2. Ballanta, Gathering Folk Tunes, 11.

Figure 7.1. Heinrich Besseler, no date. From Festschrift Heinrich Besseler zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, 2.

Figure 8.1a. Herman Reichenbach. Courtesy of Herman Reichenbach Jr.

Figure 8.1b. The Reichenbach siblings. Left to right: The journalist Bernhard Reichenbach, Wendelin Reichenbach, the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, and Herman Reichenbach. Courtesy of Herman Reichenbach Jr.

Figure 8.2. Reichenbach’s pentatonic modes. From his Formenlehre, 31.

Figure 8.3. Sing-along at Berlin Jungfernheide in 1930, attended by four thousand people. Courtesy of Archiv der deutschen Jugendbewegung, Burg Ludwigstein, Witzenhausen.

Figure 8.4. Morning celebration in a circle of a Singbewegung gathering. Courtesy of Archiv der deutschen Jugendbewegung, Burg Ludwigstein, Witzenhausen.

Figure 9.1. Map of mission stations in German East Africa. From Müller and Schulze, 200 Jahre Brüdermission, 2:464.

Figure 10.1. Traugott Bachmann, 1913. Courtesy of UA.

Figure 10.2. Photograph of Franz Rietzsch and his wife, Hanna, with their daughter Elisabeth. Courtesy of UA.

Figure 10.3. Anhemitonic pentatonic scale with two minor thirds in irimba music, also called the Gogo scale. Adapted from Kubik, Theory of African Music, 1:179.

Figure 10.4a. Anhemitonic pentatonic scale for vocal music of the Nyakyusa. Adapted from Kubik, Theory of African Music, 1:173–74.

Figure 10.4b. Harmonies associated with pentatonic scale. Adapted from Kubik, Theory of African Music, 1:173.

Figure 10.5. Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist. In Kinyakyusa (Rietzsch Nachlass), owned by the author.

Figure 10.6. Stephan Mbunga, Gloria from Missa Baba Yetu. Published by and courtesy of the Benedictine Mission in Peramiho.

Figure 11.1. Map of the Leipzig Mission stations in the Kilimanjaro Area. Courtesy of Althaus, Mamba-Anfang (1968), 103.

Figure 11.2. Bruno Gutmann with his teachers (1912). Courtesy of Leipzig Mission.

Figure 11.3. Leipzig missionaries were also active among the nearby Maasai and introduced Lutheran chorales to them as well. Here they are listening to the Leipzig Thomaner Choir on a phonograph. Photograph by Leipzig missionary Wilhelm Guth, between 1927 and 1938. Courtesy of Leipzig Mission.

Figure 11.4. Harvest dance of male youths with drums by missionary Wilhelm Guth, taken probably after 1924. Courtesy of Leipzig Mission.

Figure 12.1. Mission inspector Walther Trittelvitz. Courtesy of VEM.

Figure 12.2. Otto Hagena. Courtesy of VEM.

Figure 12.3. Bishop Josiah Kibira, who became the first black president of the Lutheran World Federation in 1977. Courtesy of VEM.

Figure 13.1. Catholic Mission stations in German East Africa. Hertlein, Die Kirche in Tanzania, 41.

Figure 13.2. P. Clemens Künster. Courtesy St. O.

Figure 13.3. Künster’s African tonal systems. From his Etwas über afrikanische Musikinstrumente, 86.

Figure 13.4. Künster’s African church modes. From his Harmonisches System, 14–15. Courtesy St. O.

Figure 13.5. P. Meinulf Küsters at the Munich Oktoberfest making recordings with Mwera women, 1930. Courtesy St. O.

Figures 13.6a and 13.6b. Küster’s examples as transcribed in Schneider, Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit, 1:30–31.

Figure 13.7. Johann Baptist Wolf’s chant as influenced by Schneider, Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit. In Mbunga, Afrikanische Musik in Gottesdienst, 58. Courtesy St. O.

Figure 13.8. Wangoni song. In Gerold, Chiriku, 6. Courtesy St. O.

Figure 13.9. Ordination of Stephan Mbunga on 9 October 1957. Mbunga is the second person from the right; the others are Andreas Mlowe, Daniel Mbunda, and Urban Luambano. Courtesy St. O.

Table 10.1. Rietzsch’s pentatonic church modes. From his Afrikanische Klänge, 30.

Table 10.2. Rühl’s pentatonic church modes. From his Die missionarische Akkommodation, 128.

Introduction

When I was nine years old my father was asked by the Lutheran World Federation to become director of a seminary to educate future Lutheran Church leaders from all over Africa. As a result, I spent two years in Tanzania, in the Kilimanjaro area. These two years transformed my life and undoubtedly were the very beginning of this project. I remember that when we arrived with the boat in Mombasa, we went to the Holy Ghost Cathedral and listened to Mass. It so happened that just six months earlier we had visited the Benedictine abbey Kloster Beuron in Germany, and there I had heard Gregorian chant for the first time. I could not believe how different Gregorian chant sounded in Mombasa! A week later we attended a Chagga service in Marangu, Tanzania, where the several-hundred-member-strong congregation sang Lutheran chorales. Again they sounded completely different from what I was used to from Germany. My father, who was usually able to answer all of my questions, was not helpful: he just said that Africans sang differently. My curiosity was aroused.

In 2004 I began to explore the archive of the Moravian Church in Herrnhut, in East Germany. Moravians were the earliest Protestant missionaries to work outside Europe; they started their activities in 1732, when the first Moravian missionaries went to St. Thomas (in the U.S. Virgin Islands) and Greenland. Other German missionary societies essentially imitated the Moravians. Looking through the various materials collected in Herrnhut, I realized that the archive was a gold mine. It contains copious correspondence between the missionaries in the field and the German center, as well as numerous diaries of the missionaries dating from the earliest years of missionary activity. Much of this material remains unexplored. It became clear to me that the Moravian archive alone would keep scores of historians busy for years.

In the end, I decided to concentrate on music in mission stations in Tanzania because I knew the country and had good contacts there. Even then, there was so much material that I had to limit myself to only a few mission societies. Since German East Africa was a colony and the relationship between the colonial administrators and the missionaries formed an important part of my research, I decided to concentrate on four mission societies that were there more or less from the beginning in 1891, when German East Africa became a German colony, and remained involved through the 1950s and 1960s, that is, through the whole colonial period (Tanganyika became independent in 1961). I eventually decided on three Protestant mission societies and one Catholic: the Moravians, the Leipzig Mission, the Bethel Mission, and the Missionsbenediktiner from St. Ottilien in Bavaria. These societies maintain rich archives, with extensive letters, diaries, and publications by missionaries. I also conducted research in Tanzania. In some cases families of the missionaries provided me with additional documents.

In studying these materials, I came to realize that many missionaries had done serious scholarly research, especially in African languages, and had been in close contact with the Africanists Carl Meinhof (Hamburg University) and Diedrich Westermann (Friedrich Wilhelm University, forerunner of Humboldt University in Berlin), who helped them with Bible translations, grammars, and dictionaries. Still more surprising to me was the discovery that many missionaries had been involved not only in linguistics, but also in ethnomusicological research. They made recordings for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv,¹ and they read articles and books by such scholars as Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Marius Schneider, and the Hamburg comparative musicologist Wilhelm Heinitz.² Subsequently, I discovered that scholarly activity was not limited to a closed club involving only white missionaries: a little-known African scholar and composer, Nicholas Ballanta, had given a lecture at a missionary conference in Le Zoute, Belgium, in 1926, as a result of which the Bethel Mission Society tried to introduce African music into the service. Clearly, comparative musicology loomed large in the mind of many missionaries.

The other discovery I made is perhaps equally surprising. It is commonly believed that missionaries introduced Christianity into indigenous societies and that they were in the service of colonial governments. While this is undoubtedly true, it is only part of the story. On the one hand, the relationship between missionaries and colonial administrations was often more complicated than has been recognized; on the other, Christianity was just one component of the culture that informed missionaries’ activities. Many missionaries come from the youth movement known as Wandervogel, which later became the Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung. So did some secular colonists, such as the imperial navy officer Hans Paasche (who, by the way, also made recordings for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv). Stationed in German East Africa between 1904 and 1908, he was forced to fight on the German side in the Maji Maji Rebellion. The experience was so traumatic that he became a pacifist and an anticolonialist. After he resigned from the navy, he spent several years in East Africa, a country he loved. Like his friends from the Wandervogel, he hated modernity and loved the Middle Ages and old folk songs (which he sang accompanying himself on the lute). He considered the African way of life ideal. His fictitious epistolary novel Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Mukara, a big bestseller from 1921, shows both his alienation from modernity and Western culture and his love for Africa. Similarly, many missionaries who came from the movement shared the belief that only in Africa could one still find an intact community (Gemeinschaft) where people looked out for one another, in contrast to the impersonal society (Gesellschaft) of modern Europe. Thus, like Paasche, they did not consider living in Africa a sacrifice; for them it was an ideal community. All of these movements (the Wandervogel and the Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung) are characterized by a passion for folk and medieval music, and a dislike for modernity and its culture. Last but not least, they all promoted participatory music making, as opposed to the concert life of the bourgeois. In Africa, everyone took part in the ritual: there was no such thing as a concert, with its division of participants into musicians and listeners.

Gradually, I realized that if I wanted to do justice to the research done by these missionaries, I had to know where they came from. What was their background? What motivated them? As a medievalist, I had long been interested in the origins of medieval musicology, and I was astonished to discover that these two interests—the music of missionaries in Africa and the origins of medieval musicology—are intertwined. At the beginning of the last century little was known about medieval music: the notation was incompletely understood, the surviving sources were not evaluated, and the theorists had barely been studied. We have long known that Friedrich Ludwig and his devoted students began systematically to explore medieval polyphony at the beginning of the last century through an analysis of the sources.³ However, at very much the same time, comparative musicologists were also interested in medieval music, approaching the field through comparisons with music of what they called primitive societies.⁴ In fact, their approach was somewhat like that of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who went to the Balkans between 1933 and 1935 to study and record contemporary oral poetry in order to find out how Greek poetry might have been orally transmitted.⁵ Lord and Parry’s work is well-known, but few people know that comparative musicologists used a similar approach.⁶

Thus, while I originally wanted to write a book on the efforts of German missionaries to introduce European church music in East Africa and to describe the music they found there, the project evolved into a history of early twentieth-century music scholarship in Germany and one of its colonies. The result is a different kind of music history from that generally associated with Germany. There will be very little on high culture or on composers and concert life. Instead, I will examine musical events in Germany in which thousands of people, not just the cultural elite, participated. I include several chapters on individuals, both scholars and missionaries, most of them completely unknown, and yet, I believe, of importance if we want to understand what happened musically in the first half of the twentieth century. And not only musically: this was a period of traumatic political upheaval, and so I have tried to account for the political attitudes and behaviors of the people I write about both during colonial times and during the Nazi period.

The book consists of three parts: part I addresses comparative musicology; part II discusses the Wandervogel, Jugendmusik-, and Singbewegung movements (essentially a who’s who of German musicology in this period); and part III tells the story of musical activities at the German mission stations in what is now Tanzania. Central to all three parts is a concern with medieval music, ethnographic research, and communal music making. The actors in all three parts were in contact with each other.

I begin part I with the origins of comparative musicology in Berlin, an undertaking largely inspired by Carl Stumpf, who recruited a group of scientists from a variety of backgrounds: Otto Abraham (medicine), Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (chemistry), and Curt Sachs (art history). Hornbostel collected orally transmitted music from all over the world in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in order to analyze and classify it. The significance of the collection (more than sixteen thousand recordings on thirty thousand cylinders and discs) can be recognized from the fact that since 1999 it has been on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.⁷ Much of the musical repertoire recorded between 1893 and 1952 is now extinct or has substantially changed.

Hornbostel modeled his research on that of comparative linguistics done a hundred years earlier, also in Berlin, under the guidance of Wilhelm von Humboldt. The result was a new discipline called comparative musicology. The central questions were similar to those of comparative linguistics: while linguists searched for the origins of language and established language trees, musicologists searched for the origins of music and the relationship of various musics to one another.⁸ Linguists used grammars to compare languages; musicologists analyzed and compared transcriptions of recorded music. Just as Humboldt had used grammars compiled by missionaries, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv asked missionaries and travelers to make recordings for the institution. And yet, it became quickly clear that while linguists were able successfully to construct language trees, musics did not lend themselves to the kind of comparisons.

How did Hornbostel and his students try to approach the question of the origins of music? While Greek was of central importance for the Indo-Europeanists, since in their opinion it was the oldest written language, musicologists concentrated on comparisons of exotic musics to European medieval music, since the latter was the earliest notated music. They found that both were pentatonic (based on a five-note scale) and that both used similar techniques when performing polyphony. These findings had far-reaching consequences. Music history textbooks from the first half of the twentieth century routinely lumped medieval music and non-European musics together, using the same terminology to describe them. Moreover, many comparative musicologists believed that they could understand and reconstruct European medieval music through a study of exotic musics.

Comparative musicology is based on comparisons, so comparative musicologists needed to identify shared features when they compared non-European with medieval music. Virtually all scholars observed parallels in the use of the modes; they also often compared polyphonic techniques. The interplay of orality and literacy was an important topic, as was the role of improvisation and of various notational systems that might be compared to medieval notation.

I concentrate on six comparative musicologists, beginning with Hornbostel, who also defined the field of African music with his article African Negro Music.⁹ Naturally, the field has undergone major changes since Hornbostel’s days. Today increased knowledge of Africa’s musical heterogeneity and cultural diversity leaves most scholars reluctant to write about African music in general. Ethnomusicologists have moved away from an older philosophy of salvage ethnography and have for the most part abandoned attempts to preserve only what appears to be an older or more homogenous repertoire. Instead, scholars have come to value and study musical hybridity, understanding that music is an interactive medium that often cuts across cultural boundaries. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Hornbostel’s articles served both as a clarion call for Africanist research in music from the perspective of the new field of comparative musicology and as a critique of current missionary practice with respect to indigenous music in Africa. My primary goals are (1) to analyze the writings of Hornbostel and other comparative musicologists, and (2) to examine the effect these writings had on German missionaries in African colonies. While there will be an occasional discussion of the evolution of ethnomusicological research’s theoretical underpinnings, I will not engage with these issues at great length, since the primary orientation of my book is historical rather than theoretical.

The following chapters in part I are on Hornbostel’s student and successor Marius Schneider, the most influential ethnomusicologist in post-1945 Germany; then, Georg Schünemann, who was also instrumental in helping to realize the goals of the Jugendbewegung in Weimar Germany; Jacques Handschin and Manfred Bukofzer (both of whom were primarily historical musicologists, but also made major contributions to comparative musicology); and finally, the African scholar Nicholas G. J. Ballanta. It is no accident that Schneider, Schünemann, Handschin, and Bukofzer were also, even primarily, medievalists. Hornbostel established the agenda of the field, Schneider and Schünemann attempted to use comparative methodology to learn how medieval music really worked and sounded, and Handschin and Bukofzer contributed to the demise of the field by proving that Hornbostel’s central contribution, the theory of the blown fifth (Blasquintentheorie) relied on faulty measurements; Handschin also challenged the evolutionary modes of thinking that informed much of comparative musicology. Surprisingly, while the historical musicologists from part I who were interacting with comparatists, including Handschin, were convinced that medieval polyphony was largely improvised, none of the historical musicologists treated in part II shared this view.

A separate chapter is devoted to the fascinating case of the little-known African scholar Nicholas Ballanta, the first recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in music, who had been sent from Africa via New York to Berlin to study with Hornbostel on the recommendation of the anthropologist Franz Boas. His relationship with Hornbostel was an unhappy one: the recordings Ballanta made for the Phonogramm-Archiv mysteriously disappeared, and Hornbostel believed that Ballanta had never sent them. Ballanta published a number of original articles in journals that were (and still are) difficult to access and thus were not read by musicologists. His book was never published because of a devastating and clearly biased review by the comparative musicologist George Herzog. And yet, much of his research on African music was written before Hornbostel’s seminal 1928 article on the subject. He was the only scholar to state explicitly that African music had nothing in common with medieval music. And his lecture at the International Mission Conference in Le Zoute in 1928 had a profound influence on one mission society.

Part II deals with the Wandervogel, a youth movement that swept Germany in the first half of the twentieth century and involved all social classes, all political movements, and all religious denominations. The movement started before World War I as a youth group in the Berlin neighborhood of Steglitz, and then in the 1920s and 1930s two new groups replaced the original Wandervogel. One, the Jugendmusikbewegung, had a more socialist leaning and resulted in exceedingly popular sing-alongs all across Germany. While much has been written about concerts of new music in Berlin, virtually nothing has been written about mass sing-alongs in the city’s many parks, where some three to four thousand people from all political parties participated. Thanks to this movement, German music education was fundamentally reformed and became one of the best systems in the world. The other movement, the Singbewegung, was mainly Protestant and characterized by singing retreats in the countryside. Both movements shared an intense dislike for modernity, popular entertainment music, and the bourgeois concert hall. What they practiced instead was participatory music making that involved both early music and folk music. There was a longing for the Middle Ages and primitive societies, where people looked out for each other—for Gemeinschaft.

Not surprisingly, research into music of the Middle Ages and folk music took center stage. The great medievalist Friedrich Ludwig, the first ordinarius in musicology in Germany, was too old to participate in the movements, but all of his most consequential students were involved, foremost among them Heinrich Besseler, Joseph Müller-Blattau, Walter Blankenburg, and Konrad Ameln. Others were Wilibald Gurlitt, Friedrich Blume, and Hans-Joachim Moser, leaders of musicology from the 1930s through the 1960s and teachers of the next generation of German and German Jewish scholars who fled Germany for the United States. The first performances of Notre Dame polyphony took place in 1922 and 1924 in Karlsruhe and Hamburg, and most of Ludwig’s and Gurlitt’s students participated. (The performers were not listed on the program, because the point of the events was participatory music making.) Two important publishing houses were established, Bärenreiter and Möseler (formerly Kallmeyer; I will refer to this firm hereinafter as Kallmeyer-Möseler), essentially in order to provide music for the singers and performers. These publishing houses also issued many of their books, including Herman Reichenbach’s widely read Formenlehre, which related all musical forms back to Gregorian chant. The German Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg was founded in 1914; the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Abteilung Volksmusik followed in Berlin in 1935.

Theodor W. Adorno was among those who was highly critical of the movement after the war because participatory music making had become a hallmark of Nazi cultural life. Many of the leaders became members of the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeitspartei (NSDAP; the Nazi Party) and embraced Hitler wholeheartedly. But there were also many Jewish members who emigrated to the United States or Palestine, and many who were so deeply affected by their participation in early-music performances in the 1920s that they devoted their life to early-music scholarship (for example, Konrad Ameln and Werner Blankenburg).

The last part deals with four different mission societies. The work of Jesuit missionaries and British and American Protestant missionaries has been much studied, yet non-Germans have had few opportunities to learn about the background of German Protestant missionaries. They were markedly different from those in England or the United States in that they were inspired by Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian Church, and considered missionary activity their main purpose in life. They were less interested in spreading Western civilization than in saving souls. In the nineteenth century another German theologian, Gustav Warneck, deeply influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), put his stamp on German mission activities. These missionaries were taught to preserve as much of the local culture as possible and were encouraged to do linguistic and ethnographic research. Grammars and dictionaries of local languages were made and sent to Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin, and the Bible and hymns were translated. In many cases attempts were made to preserve local folklore and culture. Very little of this work is known today.

With respect to all missionary societies, I have tried to answer two questions: First, what kind of scholarly research did they do in music? And second, what music was performed in the service? I am not concerned with the theological contents of missionary activity or conversion. All three Protestant mission societies (the Moravians, the Leipzig Mission, and the Bethel Mission) did important research on local music, many made recordings, collected local fairy tales and sayings, and tried to introduce local music in the 1930s. German Catholic missionaries made recordings for Hornbostel and Schneider, but the Pope’s motu proprio prevented them from introducing any local music into the service. All mission societies, with one exception, believed that medieval and African music were similar. And since most missionaries came from the Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung, they believed in participatory music making.

In each chapter I center in on a few missionaries and their contributions. The Moravian Traugott Bachmann did fundamental linguistic work (Bible translation and beginning work on the Nhiya grammar) and made recordings for Hornbostel that were transcribed and analyzed by numerous comparative musicologists. He was probably the first missionary to try to introduce local music and dance into the religious service in the early 1900s. Franz Ferdinand Rietzsch, another Moravian, steeped in the Singbewegung, was probably the best-trained musician among the missionaries, with a strong background in comparative musicology. Not only did he do fundamental research on Nyakyusa music long before Gerhard Kubik, but he also tried to introduce fifteenth-century polyphony into the service because he believed it was similar to Nyakyusa polyphony. He failed spectacularly.

The Leipzig missionary Bruno Gutmann (1876–1966) was perhaps the most important scholar among the missionaries, with volumes of fundamental work on the Wachagga and numerous honorary doctorates for his research. Even though he did not have a strong background in music, he came under the influence of the Singbewegung in the 1920s and published extensively with the movement’s publisher Bärenreiter. He was invited to gatherings and talked and wrote with great conviction about the Wachagga, a culture that was similar to how he imagined medieval society to have been, with close family and community ties and rituals marking important life events. As a result, he transformed the Chagga rituals into Christian ones and translated hundreds of Lutheran chorales into Chagga. Both rituals and chorales are alive and well and remain much loved to this day.

Otto Hagena, a missionary for the Bethel Mission, was the best educated of the missionaries, having attended Friedrich Nietzsche’s old school, Schulpforta. As a result he made major contributions to the translation of the New Testament from Greek to Haya, and he also gave a detailed and exceptionally complex account of Haya music in the 1920a and 1930s. Nevertheless, even though he would have loved to introduce Haya music into the service, it proved beyond his abilities. Before Hagena came to missionize and study them, the Hayas had the reputation of being completely unmusical and resistant to Western music. Hagena taught them Lutheran chorales with such success that one of his students, Josiah Kibira, who became the first black president of the Lutheran World Federation in 1970, insisted on continuing the Lutheran tradition even when later missionaries wanted to introduce local music into the service.

As for the Catholic missionaries from St. Ottilien, I do not concentrate on a single figure. Their beginnings were unhappy because they were close to colonial administrators, a circumstance that led to several of their missionaries being killed because the local population associated them with the colonial government. They even sent back one of their missionaries because he stood up to the German military on behalf of a member of his congregation. In the beginning, their attitude to local music was similarly dismissive; but, in addition, Catholics all over the world were also hampered by the pope’s motu proprio. Nevertheless, they shared the common belief that African music was similar to medieval music and therefore felt fully justified introducing Gregorian chant everywhere and with great success. Also, the Catholic missionaries noticed the importance of participatory music making in Africa, commenting that Gregorian chant was therefore particularly appropriate.

Most astonishing is the story of how eventually something akin to local music was introduced in the mission stations. Marius Schneider transcribed Ngoni music from the phonograms provided by Catholic missionaries in his Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit. When the book was published in 1934, he sent a copy to Peramiho in Tanganyika. A few years later, in the late 1930s and ’40s, another missionary, Jean Baptiste Wolf, found the book in the Peramiho library, looked at Ngoni songs, and noticed that they were similar to some Gregorian chant melodies he knew. He then took his Graduale Romanum, looked for antiphons that were melodically similar to the Ngoni songs transcribed by Schneider, and provided them with a Swahili text. They were sung with great success all over Tanganyika. Eventually a student of Wolf’s, Stephan Mbunga, was sent to study with Marius Schneider in Cologne. Upon his return, and after he became rector of the Peramiho Seminary in 1968, he was finally able to introduce local music and dance into the service. The circle closes: Hornbostel and Schneider commissioned recordings from the Benedictine missionaries, and the Benedictines, in turn, used transcriptions of these recordings to perform local music. What better example than this to show that comparative musicology and music in the mission stations must be studied together!

In this book I uncover the remarkable interaction between the activities of missionaries, on the one hand, and the early twentieth-century scholarship on and performance of medieval and non-European music, on the other, as well as the lively interaction between early medievalists and ethnomusicologists (interactions that later disappeared). My book is fundamentally an attempt to bring this triangle back to life.

PART I

The Search for the Origins of Music:

Comparative Musicology

Comparative musicology should unearth from collected and critically classified material the common factors and the context of musical development in all parts of the world, clarify differences on the basis of particular cultural relationships, and finally, by extrapolation, draw conclusions regarding origins.

—Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Über die Verbreitung des Phonographen für die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (1904)

Instead of accounts based on myths, we can now use the results from comparative musicology. If we want to investigate the problems of Greek and medieval music, and if the relationship between art and folk music is not to be based entirely on speculation, this is the only way to go. It is not necessary to place the music of uncivilized people as well as the art of Asian culture people [Kulturvölker], which we can now study thanks to phonograph recordings, on an equal footing with our music. Instead, we can see them as precursors of our musical development. And with systematic summaries of separate studies, it will be possible to create a foundation for the beginnings of music history which derives from a music that is alive and practiced rather than descriptions based on laborious and unreliable constructions.

—Georg Schünemann,Über die Beziehungen der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft zur Musikgeschichte (1920)

If we want to understand the history of the German music scholarship and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, we need to consider the new field of comparative musicology. While ethnomusicologists have written fundamental studies of comparative musicology, these studies have neglected the influence comparative musicology had on historical musicology. And while we know that the field started in Berlin at Friedrich Wilhelm University, there is still much to be learned about the aims and goals of the discipline. We can begin by asking how comparative musicology affected German musical life. In this part of the book, I shall summarize the contributions of some of the most important comparative musicologists and attempt to determine their agenda and impact. I shall also address the reasons for the eventual demise of the discipline.

In 1900 Carl Stumpf was appointed chair of the psychology department at Friedrich Wilhelm University. In the same year a music-theater group from Siam visited Berlin, and Stumpf, together with Otto Abraham, a physician, made a recording of them.¹ Stumpf realized very quickly that only with a large number of recordings could he conduct serious research into musics from different cultures. Thus, he set out to establish the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin, which was to collect performances of orally transmitted music from all over the world in order to analyze, compare, and classify it. Since he was a psychologist, he was also interested in the psychological effect of music. Significantly, he also called for an investigation of musical instruments. Stumpf was joined in 1905 by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, who took over the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in 1906 and ran it until he was forced to emigrate in 1933. This collection forms an important basis for the research undertaken in this book.

Stumpf and Hornbostel are considered among the founders of the new discipline of comparative musicology, which eventually developed into ethnomusicology. They analyzed their recordings for three distinct purposes: to determine scales and tone systems, to transcribe and analyze musical structures, and to create a classification system for musical instruments. Where did Hornbostel and Stumpf get the idea to compare musics of different cultures to one another? And what were the questions they wanted to find answers for? In a lecture from 24 March 1905 given at the meeting of the International Musicological Society in Vienna, Hornbostel begins by stressing that the most noble means of scientific knowledge is comparison.² The comparison of different things makes it possible to recognize similarities and to deduce laws from them. Even though most scholarship is based on comparisons, he singles out anatomy and comparative linguistics as particular models for comparative musicology.³ While it might seem surprising to us that a musicologist is modeling his work on that of anatomists, we shall see that Hornbostel got this idea from nineteenth-century German scholars. Comparative anatomy creates new classifications and also inspires one to do investigations in completely new fields. It also makes it possible to define research as scientific rather than humanistic. Indeed, this was one of the main reasons comparative linguists saw themselves as analogous to anatomists. Hornbostel writes:

First philology studied the separate languages individually, then comparative linguistics started to spin connecting threads between them. Also here the idea of evolution had to occur all on its own, as a scout that led to new groupings. Languages of the so-called primitive people, which had thus far received little attention, were suddenly of particular interest. Within the known language areas of the civilized lands [Kulturländer], dialects were carefully studied, and thus it became possible to compare a constantly increasing amount of material.⁴

Hornbostel has an even more detailed description of the parallels in his 1904 article, Über die Verbreitung des Phonographen für die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (On the Use of the Phonograph in Comparative Musicology).

In the same way that philology initially researched individual languages with respect to the separate categories of vocabulary, laws of inflection, and syntax, so until recently has musicology involved itself exclusively with the history of our European musical system and European forms of composition. But whereas philology completely adopted the comparative method within a short time, musicology has ventured only a few tentative steps in the new direction, and it would be premature to speak of comparative musicology as an established cultural discipline. In fact, surveys of music history usually do contain a fleeting sketch of the circumstances of foreign music; however, the consideration is advanced primarily from an artistic, subjective-aesthetic point of view, and the struggle toward scientific objectivity is a most recent phenomenon.⁵

Hornbostel shows a detailed knowledge of the methods of comparative linguistics, observing that scholars compared languages with respect to vocabulary, inflection, and syntax.⁶ As we consider what the corresponding categories for music might be, I suggest that comparative linguistics could have set the agenda for Hornbostel and his colleagues and students. In what follows, I will not give an overview of the entire field, but instead concentrate on topics that have had an impact on comparative musicology.

CHAPTER ONE

Comparative Musicology and Comparative Linguistics

In 1769 the Prussian Academy invited scholars to participate in a competition to answer the question of whether man could have invented language all on his own, and if so, how he went about it.¹ The winning entry was composed by the twenty-six-year-old Lutheran pastor Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote an article entitled Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Spache (Treatise on the Origin of Language), published in 1772.² The text is generally considered the beginning of comparative linguistics.³ Herder argued that the language and thought of a people are intrinsically linked. While the idea that language is the tool of human thinking had been voiced before, understanding language as the content and form of human thinking was new.⁴ Herder suggested that language and thought originated at the same time, depended on each other, and evolved together through successive stages of growth. The logical consequence was that one could only understand a culture by knowing the language well.⁵ As Isaiah Berlin recognized, for Herder each collective individuality "has its own aims and standards, which will themselves inevitably be superseded by other goals and values. . . . Each of these systems is objectively valid in its own day, in the course of ‘Nature’s long year’ which brings all things to pass. All cultures