Conference Agenda

‘[T]he head and hand […] of Moravian missions in England’, according to William Wilberforce MP in 1815, was the Revd Christian Ignatius Latrobe (1758–1836). As Secretary of the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathen, Latrobe supported and publicised the activities of the missions through his own travels overseas, an extraordinarily widespread correspondence, and the publication of Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren [the Moravian Church]. He began publishing the latter in 1790, and by his retirement, 44 years later, 500 copies of each issue were circulating among the British ruling elite—both spiritual and secular—disseminating the lives, labour, and testimony of Moravian missionaries working in British colonies.

Like many fellow Moravians, Latrobe was a gifted musician – an instrumentalist and composer who became a friend of Burney and Haydn, and whose six-volume A Selection of Sacred Music from the Works of Some of the Most Eminent Composers of Germany and Italy (1806–25) and Hymn-Tunes, sung in the Church of the United Brethren (1790) can be seen as a direct and influential extension of his work for the missions at home and abroad.

Descriptions of musical interactions between missionaries and indigenous communities in Latrobe’s Periodical Accounts, among other sources, expose multiple moments of connection between different music histories that collided through imperial and colonial encounters. In this paper, we explore, firstly, what these reveal about the negotiation of values and practices associated today with a nascent British imperial identity in the early nineteenth century; and, secondly, how knowledge of music in the “non-western” world informed the emergence of a popular movement attracting Britons to spiritual labour overseas (supported by thousands of small donations at home) with its roots in the Moravian diaspora.

In May of 1878, Julio César, a Luiseño Indian from Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, recounted his early life as a choral singer in Alta California, the northernmost region of Spanish colonization on the American continent. As one of a handful of extant testimonies from Native people who negotiated the California Mission system (1769–1840), he offered a few yet sobering details about music instruction and practices among a host of experiences. Asked if he was taught to read and write, he noted, “they taught [us] only prayers, and to sing mass from memory. Well, they did not teach me to read church music. There were singers and instrumentalists, but everything was [done] from memory. I never saw anyone given music from which to read.” With only passing mentions as exceptions, Julio César and other Native voices have yet to be taken into meaningful account in the literature on music of the California Missions. Scholars have typically centered mission music and music-making on Spanish Franciscan missionary labor. Indigenous voices have largely been left unattended, in turn, tending towards the reproduction of well-worn tropes of Native people as passive agents of history. Drawing on archival research, and in consultation with California Indian scholars, I will reconsider the music and musicians of the California Missions. Moving beyond a conventional reading of this material as a body of Spanish and Mexican colonial repertoire, I will explore possibilities for understanding these sources as an Indigenous musical archive, potentially opening a new path that unsettles notions of the “Indian as colonial subject.” What can the colonial record reveal about Native agency and expressive culture? How can music manuscripts interpreted primarily by Native singers and instrumentalists reshape our understanding of colonial material culture and practices? What can Julio César’s experience tell us about the extent of text-centered music programs as situated by scholars? I seek to respond to historians Damon Akins and William Bauer’s call to employ Indigenous epistemological frameworks in historical examinations, thus applied in broadly reconsidering Spanish colonial repertories writ large across spatial and temporal borderlands.

American Protestant missions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by a commitment to the publication of Christian literature in different languages. This orientation was clearly manifest in the work of the U.S. Protestant mission in Korea, whose beginning is traced to the 1880s. During the mission’s first two decades, missionary coteries published more than a dozen hymnals in Korean. A trans-linguistic bibliographic analysis of these hymnals suggests an attempted U.S.-to-Korea transplantation of mid-to-late nineteenth century Anglo-American hymnody, a body of text whose evangelical temperament was crystallized by the classical writings of Watts and Wesley, as well as American voices such as Fanny Crosby and Lowell Mason. It is easy to consider these translated hymns in turn-of-the-century Korea as hegemonic “global” music-poetic texts – an ecology of sounds and expressions alien to the locals yet enforced by religious workers from a much more powerful nation. However, in this presentation I advance other narratives. First, I argue that the translated hymns helped to shape Korean Christian spaces as a socially meaningful location in the context of the Japanese colonial takeover of Korea, which began in the late nineteenth century and formalized in 1910. I consider the particular positioning of churches in colonized Korea as an outwardly depoliticized space intersecting with powerful U.S. nationals. The hymns, published in Korean rather than Japanese unlike most other prints in colonized Korea, were suffused with evangelical tropes that imagined a nation’s prophetic delivery from bondage and individual redemption in social uncertainty. Second, by positioning the translated hymns within the broader Korean-language Christian publications at this time, I argue that it is possible to consider the hymns as part of the discourse that mediated the technical and ideological parameters of hymnal versification, rather than as authoritative texts for Korean congregations. I show how specific hymns were edited, revised, cited, critiqued, and appropriated by Christian pundits, both missionary and Korean, who felt they had a stake in the direction of Korean Christianity. My new takes on the translated hymns invites new ways of thinking about continuity and change regarding transborder musical movements.