Books by Anna Maria Busse Berger

"The modern discipline of musicology has its roots in early-twentieth-century Germany and in three seemingly distinct but surprisingly connected areas of musical activity: the discovery of Medieval music and music theory through the all-consuming unearthing and decoding of documents; the tremendous growth of youth movements devoted to collective singing and music-making and the study of Medieval music; and the exportation of this music to Protestant and Catholic missions in German East Africa, where it was widely taught and performed. Underlying these activities was the belief that Medieval music, its structure and soundworld, had affinities with the music of "primitive" societies, such as those the missionaries encountered in East Africa. Rejected outright by African musicians and scholars at the time, the belief was kept alive in the European musicological community through the first half of the twentieth century. Anna Maria Busse Berger draws this all together for the first time, anchoring her writing in extensive archival research and her personal experience as the daughter of a German Lutheran missionary in East Africa. The result is a momentous re-thinking of the early history of music scholarship as well as a novel understanding of the imperial and colonial projects that shaped Germany's perception of itself at a crucial time in its history"--

This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.