Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago
Anna Maria Busse Berger · Henry Spiller
Mar 2025 · Univ of California Press
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348
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Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.
Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.
About the author
Anna Maria Busse Berger is Distinguished Professor of Music emerita at the University of California, Davis and the author of The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, and Mensuration and Proportion Signs. Henry Spiller is Professor of Music emeritus at the University of California, Davis and the author of Erotic Triangles, Javaphilia, Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java, and Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia.
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