This book highlights the agency of ethnomusicology—how the discipline both objectified and affected communal singing and its repertoire in African missionary societies. The primary goals are to analyze the scholarship by the ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and his successors and to investigate the effects these writings had on missionaries in the colony of German East Africa. The book is organized in three parts and provides an extensive number of references as well as a generous bibliography.
Part I deals with the origins of ethnomusicology and the notion of music in preindustrial societies as a key to the knowledge of medieval music. Chapter 1 focuses on the life and research of Hornbostel. Chapters 2–5 deal with Hornbostel’s successors Marius Schneider, Georg Schünemann, and Jacques Handschin, and Manfred Bukofzer. Busse Berger repeatedly points out that comparative musicology is based on the notion of races as well as how the various actors...
