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...