The Cultural Production of Scalability: Music, Colonialism and the Moravian Missionary Project

Abstract Analysis of the work of the music historian, composer, editor and Moravian missionary administrator Christian Ignatius Latrobe (1756–1836) enables a better understanding of the role of music in colonial expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century. In London, Latrobe received and circulated accounts of the missions’ supposed success in training disciplined and ‘sweet’ choirs of Christian singers from among formerly ‘heathen’ ‘barbarians’, and these accounts were taken to demonstrate the scalability of the ‘civilisation’ project of European colonialism, which suited both antislavery campaigners and colonial state officials. Latrobe sent standardised Christian hymn books, in English and German but also translated into indigenous languages, to mission stations around the world, from Suriname to Jamaica to Labrador to Greenland to Siberia to South Africa. He also sent musical instruments to accompany the hymn-singing, favouring the organ both aesthetically and for its ability to function in different climates. He also circulated specific instructions for training organists, with firm recommendations for a simple accompaniment style and learning hymns by heart. At the different stations, the policy increasingly became to train local members of the congregation according to Latrobe’s advice, so that the instrument, the canon of tunes and the performance conventions were exported uniformly from Europe, embodied in the organ and the organist. Crucially, this uniform and standardised imposition of music—although always resisted and never fully achieved—required the remaking of the cultural landscapes on which they were to be imposed, including through the violent outlawing of existing musical practices and styles. As such, key periods in the history of large-scale musical colonisation can be better understood when framed in terms of the cultural production of scalability, following Anna Tsing, with empirical attention to the efforts involved in musical scale-building projects that make claims about music’s universal qualities and that seek to propagate a standardised, common music around the world.

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