Next week, the IU Musicology Department will host Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Medieval and Renaissance History and Theory at the University of California Davis, as she visits Bloomington to deliver the Inaugural Peter Burkholder Lecture, established in May 2019 in honor of Distinguished Professor Emerita J. Peter Burkholder and in celebration of his retirement. The event will take place in Ford Hall (located in the Simon Music Center) on Friday, April 1, at 12:30 pm. Her talk, titled “Bruno Gutmann, the WaChagga, and Jugendbewegung,” will present her research on the work of the most important German missionary and ethnographer active in East Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. See abstract below.
Anna Maria Busse Berger she served on the music faculty at UC Davis from 1989 through her retirement in 2020. Busse Berger has published articles and books on notation, mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations. Her article “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist-Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s” won both the Colin Slim Award for best article by a senior scholar from the AMS and the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2014. Her book In Search of Medieval Music in Africa and Germany: Scholars, Singers and Missionaries 1891–1961 was published by University of Chicago Press in 2020.
This event is co-sponsored by the Jacobs School of Music Lecture Committee, the Department of History, the Department of Germanic Studies, the African Studies Program, the Institute for European Studies, and the Department of Musicology.
Please email musicol@indiana.edu with questions or for more information.
Abstract: “Bruno Gutmann, the Chagga, and Jugendbewegung”
Bruno Gutmann (1876-1966) was the most important German missionary/ethnographer active in East Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. His stay in Tanzania falls into two periods: 1902-1920 and 1926-1938. In addition to translating the New Testament into Chagga, he wrote numerous studies of Chagga law and society.
Even though Gutmann was not a trained musicologist, his views on church music in the mission field are of great importance. Why was he so skillful in preserving Chagga culture, but did not advocate introduction of local music into the service? In his first years, he and his colleagues introduced the Lutheran chorale mainly because for them local music was morally not acceptable since it was invariably linked to dance and rituals which they found repulsive.
However, when he returned to Germany in the 1920s his views changed radically: he fell under the spell of Jugendmusik and Singbewegung which promoted a sense of Gemeinschaft by means of communal singing of folk music and early music, particularly medieval music. They sought an escape from modernity in “primitive” cultures. Most of the German musicologists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were members of the movement (Heinrich Besseler, Friedrich Blume, Konrad Ameln, etc.). When Gutmann returned to Germany in 1920 he was received by them with open arms: he talked about Gemeinschaft in Africa, Singbewegung publisher Bärenreiter published several of his books (Chagga participatory music is described as the ideal Gemeinschaftsmusik), and African songs were transcribed and performed all over Germany.
As a result, also Gutmann’s attitude to music changed. When he returned to Africa in 1926 he argued that the Lutheran chorale is inextricably linked to the Gospel. He now translated all Lutheran chorales into Chagga (he was quite a poet) or wrote new texts for the melodies which would correspond to a Chagga ritual. Both rituals and chorales are alive and well to this day: Lutheran chorales are a required part of the regular choral competitions taking place every year in Tanzania.
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