The cultural production of scalability : Music, colonialism and the Moravian missionary project

• Main Author: Dodds, Philip
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Musicology; Music; Cultural Studies; Performing Arts; History of Religions; Greenland; Siberia
• Online Access: https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/8e886933-9c9e-4af1-baa8-da6a6068d245

What role has music played in global colonial projects? And how has musical colonisation been implemented on a large scale? To address these questions, I analyse the work of the evangelical missionary administrators Christian Ignatius Latrobe (1756–1836) and Hans-Peter Hallbeck (1784–1840). Latrobe was a London-based music historian, composer and editor who oversaw the missionary work of the Moravian Church, and his role involved sending personally approved hymn books, musical instruments and performance instructions to mission stations in Suriname, Jamaica, Labrador, Greenland, Siberia and especially the Cape Colony. Hallbeck was the man he appointed as superintendent of the Moravian missions in South Africa. Hallbeck was responsible for training indigenous African musicians and choirs according to Latrobe’s stipulations. Together, they sought to export standardised performance conventions, musical instruments and canons of tunes from Europe. Crucially, this uniform and standardised imposition of music required the remaking of the cultural landscapes on which they were imposed, including through the proscription and violent denigration of existing musical practices and styles. Following Anna Tsing (2012), I pay empirical attention to the ‘scale-building’ effort involved in imposing a standardised music across different colonial contexts, and I assess the contribution of this musical ‘scalability project’ to the expansion of British colonialism in the nineteenth century. Finally, I highlight some key processes of large-scale musical colonisation that might apply in other times and places, including in contemporary contexts.