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The Examiner and the Evangelist: Authorities of Music and Empire, c.1894

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2020

ERIN JOHNSON-WILLIAMS
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Abstract

In the 1890s, two musicians travelled between Britain and South Africa. One was the first examiner to travel abroad to examine for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, Franklin Taylor. At the same time as Taylor’s arrival in the Cape in 1894, a black South African composer, John Knox Bokwe, prepared to republish a tonic sol-fa hymnal containing many hymns that eventually became popular in Britain, to which Bokwe travelled multiple times. Although these narratives might appear to reflect highly divergent contexts for musical experience, the fluctuating constructions of imperial authority encountered in the careers of both these men link their stories together more deeply than their geographical and cultural disparities set them apart. The synchronous presentation of their stories in this article thus raises questions of how music emerged as a metaphor for constructions of imperial knowledge across shifting cultural boundaries.

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Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 145 , Issue 2 , November 2020 , pp. 317 - 350
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Many people have offered their time and patience in reading various drafts of this article. The original version of this research appeared as a chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University; special thanks go to my Yale dissertation committee, Tim Barringer, James Hepokoski and Sarah Weiss. Since I came to Durham, detailed insights on more recent versions have been provided by Martin Clayton, Julian Horton, Laura Leante and Bennett Zon. Anna Bull, Philip Burnett, Ayla Lepine, Yvonne Liao, Charles McGuire and Roger Parker have all taken the time to engage with various forms of this work and to provide insightful comments. I would also like to thank the editors of and reviewers for this journal for their thoughtful and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Their feedback has immeasurably contributed to the quality of the work. Finally, I must acknowledge Roe-Min Kok, whose postcolonial work on the ABRSM inspired me to approach this topic in the first place.

References

1 Recent scholarly engagements with music and empire include, but are not limited to, Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2000); Richards, Jeffrey, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Europe, Empire and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780–1940s: Portrayal of the East, ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007); Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

2 Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, ‘Introduction: Imperial Listening’, Audible Empire, ed. Radano and Olaniyan, 1–22 (pp. 1–2).

3 I use the phrase ‘unsettled imperial boundaries’ here in direct reference to Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy’s claim: ‘Perhaps the most striking contribution that recent [historical] scholarship has made to our understanding of imperialism and colonialism’ is the ‘unsettling of the boundaries conventionally drawn between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, between one colony and another, even between particular groups within individual colonies’. Ghosh, and Kennedy, , ‘Introduction’, Decentring Empire: Britian, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Ghosh and Kennedy (London: Sangam, 2006), 1–15 (p. 1)Google Scholar.

4 ABRSM Archives, Minutes of the Annual Dinners, 1894, pp. 11–12, 18.

5 The address of the Corinthia Hotel is 10 Whitehall Place, London, SW1A 2BD. It first opened in 1885. See Franziska Bollerey, ‘Beyond the Lobby: Setting the Stage for Modernity – the Cosmos of the Hotel’, Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality, ed. Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey (London: Routledge, 2013), 3–48 (p. 41).

6 Stainer, John, ‘Inaugural Address to the Twenty-First Session’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 21 (1984), xii–xviGoogle Scholar.

7 Bowtle, Graeme, The Law of Ship Mortgages (Abingdon: Informa Law from Routledge, 2016), 35 Google Scholar. See also James Dundas White, The Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, with Notes, Appendices, and Index (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1894), British Library, General Reference Collection, 6376.ee.8. For further reading, see Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

8 On the opening of the Tower Bridge, see Dennis, Richard, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12–14 Google Scholar.

9 Ruxton, Ian, ‘The Ending of Extraterritoriality in Japan’, Turning Points in Japanese History, ed. Bert Edström (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 2002), 84–101 (p. 98)Google Scholar.

10 See Stevens, Robin, ‘Emily Patton: An Australian Pioneer of Tonic Sol-fa in Japan’, Research Studies in Music Education, 14 (2000), 40–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 As Bernarr Rainbow noted in his history of the spread of the tonic sol-fa movement, ‘Apart from the British colonies, the system flourished in the mission field in outposts as remote as Fiji, Japan, Burma and China. And now the remarkable sight-singing of elementary schoolchildren in Britain had begun to attract the notice of educationists in other European countries.’ Rainbow, John Curwen: A Short Critical Biography (Sevenoaks: Novello, 1980), 51.

12 See Imvo Zabantsundui, 25 July 1894, trans. Lucia, Christine, The World of South African Music: A Reader (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2005), 318 Google Scholar.

13 For further reading on the history of the British in nineteenth-century South Africa, see Comaroff, Jean, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapter 2: ‘From Event to Structure: The Precolonial Sociocultural Other’ (pp. 42–77), and Thomas Packenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993). For a broad overview, see Thomas (T. R. H.) Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); and Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

14 See Gandhi, Rajmohan, Gandhi: The Man, his People and the Empire (London: Haus Books, 2007), 73 Google Scholar.

15 See Hooker, James Ralph, Henry Sylvester Williams: Imperial Pan-Africanist (London: Collings, 1975)Google Scholar, and Marika Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2011).

16 Bokwe’s hymns were taken to Scotland by Alexander Neil Somerville, and became popular enough to be published (although adapted) in 1893 in Hymns and Melodies, for School and Family Use (Edinburgh: Gall & Inglis, 1893). See also Lucia, The World of South African Music, 346 n. 328, and Okigbo, Austin C., ‘Musical Enculturation, Theological Transformation, and the Construction of Black Nationalism in Early South African Choral Music Tradition’, Africa Today, 57 (2010), 43–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Van der Linden, Music and Empire, 1–2.

18 Ghosh and Kennedy, ‘Introduction’, 1.

19 I use the phrase ‘colonizer and colonized’ in reference to the influential text by Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfield (London: Souvenir Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

20 Born, Georgina, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 205–43 (p. 205)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 ABRSM Archives, Minutes of the Annual Dinners, 1897, p. 12 (emphasis added).

22 A large study of how musical systems worked within the British empire has been undertaken by Richards, Imperialism and Music.

23 Cape Town’s strategic location for international trade made the imperial scramble to settle and gain control over South Africa very acute, which enabled a large European population to cultivate an interest in importing Western music. It was also a large base for mission stations. See Feinstein, Charles H., An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Literature on the history of the Trinity College of Music examinations is notably scant (with the exception of the brief account of it by Stephen Banfield cited below), and a comparative study with that of the ABRSM is certainly needed, especially as Trinity was the first British examining presence in the colonies. Trinity College was the first to set up an examination board in Britain, and its exams were operating in South Africa as early as 1881. In contrast to the ABRSM, the origins of the Trinity exams were liturgical and not associated with the British Crown or schools of music that were patented as ‘Royal’. The Trinity College exams were thus a competitor to those of the ABRSM, but by its name alone the latter arguably aligned itself with a more explicitly imperial project. On the Trinity College examinations in South Africa, see Banfield, Stephen, ‘Towards a History of Music in the British Empire: Three Export Studies’, Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 63–89 Google Scholar, and David Wright, The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music: A Social and Cultural History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 42–50. I am aware that there are currently historical archives relating to the growth of the Trinity exams held at the Trinity College London Examinations headquarters that have not yet entered the public domain, and will certainly be worth exploring.

25 For a comprehensive study of class, race and gender in Victorian South Africa, see Bickford-Smith, Vivian, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

26 Musical News, July 1894, 49.

27 This is explored below, particularly with regard to the Musical Times interview with Taylor in 1899.

28 Contemporaneous ideas of race, class and skin colour were deeply entrenched in South Africa during the 1890s. See, for example, publications such as Stow, George W., The Native Races of South Africa (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1905)Google Scholar, and George McCall Theal, The Yellow and Dark-Skinned People of South Africa South of the Zambesi (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1910). Regarding the permeation of these ideas in Britain, see Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

29 Not much is known about Taylor’s early life before Leipzig, apart from the fact that at the age of 13 he became organist at the Old Meeting Place, Birmingham, after having studied with the organist at Lichfield Cathedral. See George Grove and Jean Mary Allen, ‘Taylor, Franklin’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/> (accessed 14 March 2018). See also Scholes, Percy, The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: A Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the Musical Times (London: Novello & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1947)Google Scholar.

30 See Leonard M. Phillips, ‘The Leipzig Conservatory, 1843–1881’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1979), especially the sections entitled ‘Music Education in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ (pp. 26–34) and ‘The Students of the Leipzig Conservatory in the Nineteenth Century’ (pp. 203–5).

31 RCM Archives, Minute Books of the Royal College of Music, 1882–9.

32 Wright, The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 51–5.

33 See Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

34 The examiner Percival Kirby was to remember that most of the pianos he encountered while travelling through South Africa were poor in quality and out of tune: see Kirby, , Wits End: An Unconventional Biography (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1967), 86 Google Scholar. Similarly, when Herbert Howells undertook an examining tour of South Africa in 1921, he reported that he had a typically miserable and uncomfortable experience of both accommodation and examining facilities in the Cape Colony, preferring instead a later examining tour of Canada in 1923. See ‘Herbert Howells’ Visit to South Africa in 1921: His Views on Music and Musicians’, South African Journal of Musicology, 18 (1998), 47–60. Such examining conditions were extremely variable, with exams sometimes taking place in rooms with bad acoustics and unreliable pianos, as the diaries of the ABRSM examiners who travelled and examined for the board during the Second World War reveal. See Cape Town, University of South Africa, Colin Taylor Collections, Diaries of Colin Taylor.

35 The Victorian legacies of the ongoing hierarchical structures of the ABRSM have been analysed from a postcolonial perspective more recently by Kok, Roe-Min, ‘Music for a Postcolonial Child: Theorizing Malaysian Memories’, Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, ed. Boynton, Susan and Kok, Roe-Min (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 89–104 Google Scholar.

36 Keegan, Timothy, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 282 Google Scholar.

37 The association of philanthropy and music has been traced by McGuire, Charles, Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On music and Victorian liberalism, see Phyllis Weliver, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Further essays on music and liberalism may be found in Music and Victorian Liberalism, ed. Sarah Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

38 The weight of German influence on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British music is discussed by Rupprecht, Philip, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 52, 92–116. That Taylor’s contemporaries mostly focused on pedagogical reform in music back in London after graduating from Leipzig is discussed by David Wright, ‘The South Kensington Music Schools and the Development of the British Conservatoire in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130 (2005), 236–82 (pp. 240–2). See also, by the same author, ‘Grove’s Role in the Founding of the RCM’, George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. Michael Musgrave (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 219–44.

39 Those classed as junior professors at the ABRSM, by contrast, earned 5 guineas per hour. Wright, The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 67.

40 See Grant Olwage’s interpretation of music’s disciplinary apparatus in ‘Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism’, Music, Power, and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 25–46.

41 This kind of social ‘improvement’ for lower-middle-class Britons abroad in places like South Africa happened across British social ‘clubs’ and colonial societies, particularly as far as soldiers there to fight the Boer War were concerned. This has been traced by Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902 (London: Routledge, 2013).

42 For a description of this event, see Young, Percy M., George Grove, 1820–1900: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1980), 241 Google Scholar.

43 This was a common theme in the experience of those working within British examination systems, as the education historian Robert Montgomery has noted; for example, in the case of the imperial spread of the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, Montgomery notes that ‘one allied oneself to a feudal overlord for employment and protection’. Montgomery, , A New Examination of Examinations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 1 Google Scholar.

44 Young, George Grove, 182–3.

45 See the archival research done in this area, which mentions Taylor, his connections and the examining careers of many of his future students, especially in South Africa, by Heinrich van der Mescht in his ‘South African Students and Other South African Connections at the Royal College of Music in London between the End of the Anglo-Boer War and the Formation of the Union of South Africa, 1902–1910’, Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, 2 (2005), 26–47, and in his ‘South African Students at the Conservatory of Music in Leipzig, 1893–1914’, South African Journal of Cultural History, 8 (1994), 79–88.

46 ABRSM Archives, Minutes of the Annual Dinners, 1894, pp. 11–12, 18.

47 Ibid., 1897, p. 5.

48 Ibid., 1894, pp. 11–12, 18.

49 Ibid.

50 See Wright, ‘The South Kensington Music Schools’, 260.

51 See Bowen, Huw V., The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

52 McCaskie, Tom C., ‘Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2001)Google Scholar, iii: The Nineteenth Century (1999), 166–93 (p. 166).

53 ABRSM Archives, Minutes of the Annual Dinners, 1896, pp. 14–15.

54 Ibid., 1896, pp. 14–15.

55 ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times (1899), 798–802 (p. 798).

56 See Introduction to James Sellick, William Stephen, Uitenhage, Past and Present: Souvenir of the Centenary, 1804–1904 (Uitenhage: Uitenhage Times, 1904)Google Scholar.

57 See Verbeek, Jennifer, Victorian and Edwardian Natal (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1982)Google Scholar, and Edna Bradlow, ‘Women and Education in Nineteenth-Century South Africa: The Attitudes and Experiences of Middle-Class English-Speaking Females at the Cape’, South African Historical Journal, 28 (1993), 119–50.

58 At this time, Uitenhage was home to the largest rail transit centre in the southeastern part of South Africa. See Sellick, Uitenhage, Past and Present, 10, and sections on Port Elizabeth in Africa’s Transport Infrastructure: Mainstreaming Maintenance and Management (London: World Bank Publications, 2011), 487–95.

59 The lists of examination pieces primarily by Bach, Czerny and Liszt (with a noticeable lack of British composers) on the ABRSM colonial syllabuses during this decade are found in Examinations – Including Licentiate and Inspections: New Zealand, India, Ceylon, Gibraltar, Malta, Jamaica, &c (New Zealand and Colonial Centres) Syllabi 1897–1933 (London: Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 1897–1933), British Library, General Reference Collection, Ac.5169/7.

60 ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times, 798. According to Janet Ritterman, this article was written by Thomas Dunhill. Ritterman, ‘The Royal College of Music, 1883–1899: Pianists and their Contribution to the Forming of a National Conservatory’, Musical Education in Europe (1770–1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges, ed. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 351–73 (p. 362). On the Hullah singing class movement, see Russell, Dave, ‘Control: Music and the Battle for the Working-Class Mind’, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 23–72 Google Scholar.

61 ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times, 556.

62 On the social differences between the Hullah and Curwen musical educational practices, see Rainbow, Bernarr, ‘The Age of Rival Systems’, Music in Educational Thought and Practice: A Survey from 800 BC (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 198–222 Google Scholar.

63 ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times, 798. The text and music for Taylor’s ‘Hurrah for England’ appears to be lost, although many songs of similar titles were emerging around 1899 in relation to the Second Boer War.

64 The Musical News is confirmed as a Curwen Press journal by McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy, 116.

65 Musical News (1895), 109.

66 ‘The Associated Board’, Musical News (1917), 36.

67 Little is known about Leonidas Polk Wheat, which is somewhat surprising given the extraordinary circumstance of a young man who, born in rural Tennessee in 1841, was able to sit out the American Civil War while being musically educated in Leipzig. He is not discussed in Phillips, ‘The Leipzig Conservatory’. The biographical information contained in this footnote was found in Hill, Mary Brawley, On Foreign Soil: American Gardeners Abroad (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), 26 Google Scholar. Wheat died in 1915 in Virginia.

68 ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times, 799 (emphasis original).

69 There is considerable academic literature on the spread of blackface minstrelsy in the nineteenth century. For an overview of recent scholarship in this area, see Waters, Hazel, ‘Putting on “Uncle Tom” on the Victorian Stage’, Race and Class, 42 (2001), 29–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elisa Tamarkin, ‘Black Anglophilia; or, The Sociability of Antislavery’, American Literary History, 14 (2002), 444–78; Derek B. Scott, ‘Blackface Minstrels, Black Minstrels, and their European Reception’, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144–70; Tracy C. Davis, ‘“I Long for my Home in Kentuck”: Christy’s Minstrels in Mid-19th-Century Britain’, Drama Review, 57 (2013), 38–65; and Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (London: Routledge, 2017). On the spread of blackface minstrelsy across the British empire, and specifically to the Cape Colony, see Chinua Thelwell, ‘“The Young Men Must Blacken their Faces”: The Blackface Minstrel Show in Preindustrial South Africa’, Drama Review, 57 (2013), 66–85.

70 ‘[Taylor] and Sullivan stayed with the Groves at Lower Sydenham for weeks at a time. On one occasion the two “niggers” of Leipzig set up such an extraordinary hullabalooing at Sydenham that not only was the old wooden house mightily shaken, but the neighborhood became so disturbed that (according to tradition) policemen came running all the way from Greenwich!’ ‘Franklin Taylor’, Musical Times, 800. Considering the highly visible presence of blackface minstrelsy in Victorian police entertainments, we can imagine that the police were called here first and foremost on the basis of noise control, rather than to stop acts of racist musical stereotyping. As Rachel Cowgill has shown, organizations such as the Metropolitan Police Minstrels were well established in London by the end of the nineteenth century: see Cowgill, ‘On the Beat: The Victorian Policeman as Musician’, Music and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul Rodmell (London: Routledge, 2016), 221–45.

71 Parratt, Walter, ‘Reminiscences of South Africa’, Royal College of Music Magazine, 1 (1904), 7 Google Scholar. Parratt’s article is very observant of the variety of races found in his South African examining tour, and especially in the case of servants: for example, he precedes the above quotation with the observation, ‘The servants in South Africa are very varied. In one town a Kaffir brought me my cup of tea before breakfast, Indians waited in the dining-room, and Zulus dragged your rickshaw when you went out.’

72 See Olwage, Grant, ‘Black Musicality in Colonial South Africa: A Discourse of Alterities’, Gender and Sexuality in South African Music, ed. Walton, Chris and Muller, Stephanus (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2005), 1–9 Google Scholar. Significantly, Olwage stresses here that there was a perceptual difference in the white Victorian mindset between black ‘musicality’ and black ‘music’, which was seen as inferior to white music, even if blacks’ ability to make music itself was greater. Ibid., 2.

73 Olwage, Grant, ‘The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 13 (2004), 203–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Taylor, Franklin, ‘Preface’, Technique and Expression in Pianoforte Playing (London: Novello, 1897), iCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 The most extensive study of the spread of tonic sol-fa outside Britain, principally to Madagascar, is McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy. See also Stevens, Robin, ‘Missionaries, Music and Method: Dissemination of Tonic Sol-fa in Asia-Pacific Countries during the Nineteenth Century’, APSMER 2005: 5th Asia Pacific Symposium on Music Education Research Proceedings, ed. Morrison, Steven J. (Seattle: School of Music, University of Washington, 2005), 1–19 Google Scholar.

76 See Shepherd, Robert H. W., Lovedale, South Africa: The Story of a Century 1841–1941 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1940), vi Google Scholar.

77 The first tonic sol-fa publication in South Africa was by Birkett, Christopher, Ingoma, or Penult Psalm-Tunes, Compiled for the Use of the Native Churches in Southern Africa (London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency, 1871)Google Scholar.

78 The Xhosa-language newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu was published consistently between 1884 and 1921. Secondary literature on the context of this newspaper can be found in Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, The Life of John Tengo Jabavu, Editor of Imvo Zabantsundu, 1884–1921 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1922); Patricia Grattan Dickson, ‘The Ideas and Influence of J. Tengo-Jabavu, Editor of Imvo Zabantsundu (1884–1921)’ (BA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1964); and Leonard Diniso Ngcongco, ‘Imvo Zabantsundu and Cape “Native” Policy, 1884–1902’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Africa, 1974). The newspaper is also used as a primary source by Beinart, William, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890–1930 (London: Currey, 1987)Google Scholar.

79 For a thorough discussion of Bokwe’s life, see Olwage, Grant, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer: Tales about Race and Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131 (2006), 1–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Imvo Zabantsundu, 25 July 1894, quoted and trans. in Lucia, The World of South African Music, 318.

81 The success of the Lovedale Press continues today. A Catalogue of Books Published by the Lovedale Press (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1956) lists more than 100 items.

82 According to Kirby, Percival J., in ‘The Use of European Musical Techniques by the Non-European Peoples of Southern Africa’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 11 (1959), 37–40 Google Scholar (p. 38).

83 Percival Kirby’s remarkable cultural transition from his RCM education to South Africa, where he had to encounter much black tonic sol-fa music, is discussed in Lucia, Christina, ‘Travesty or Prophecy? Views of South African Black Choral Composition’, Music and Identity: Transformation and Negotiation, ed. Akrofi, Eric Ayisi, Smit, Maria and Thorsén, Stig-Magnus (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007), 161–80Google Scholar.

84 On the history of racial determinism and the objectification of authenticity that was prevalent for musicologists such as Kirby, see Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Traditional Music and Cultural Identity: Persistent Paradigm in the History of Ethnomusicology’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 20 (1988), 26–42, and Bruno Nettl, Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010). These concerns also correlate with those of folk-song collectors such as Cecil Sharp, who worried about the contamination of British rural traditions by allegedly corrupt cosmopolitan and commercial influences. See Sharp, Cecil J., English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin, 1907)Google Scholar.

85 On the South African choir in Britain, see Erlmann, Veit, ‘“Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised”: Local Culture, World System and South African Music’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20 (1994), 165–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Of relevance here is MacKenzie, John M., The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

87 Kirby, ‘The Use of European Musical Techniques’, 38.

88 Kirby’s opinion that tonic sol-fa was an inferior method is revealed in his autobiography, Wits End, 85–90.

89 Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 4.

90 Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 194.

91 Snedeger, Keith, Mission, Science, and Race in South Africa: A. W. Roberts of Lovedale, 1883–1938 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 19 Google Scholar.

92 Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, vi.

93 Stewart, James, Lovedale South Africa: Illustrated by Fifty Views from Photographs (Edinburgh: A. Elliot, 1894), 80 Google Scholar. This book, published in Edinburgh with a photograph of black and white mission activity on every other page, was intended as a souvenir for the Scottish Free Church-goer rather than as a book that would have been read by black South Africans.

94 Duncan, Graham A., Lovedale, Coercive Agency: Power and Resistance in Mission Education (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2003), 200–1Google Scholar.

95 Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 512.

96 Stewart, James, Lovedale, Past and Present: A Register of Two Thousand Names (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1887), 22–4Google Scholar.

97 Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 241.

98 Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 4, citing John Knox Bokwe, letter to Mr Shaw, 14 July 1885, and letter to R. Kawa, 10 May 1886. National Library of South Africa (Cape Town campus), ‘Letterbooks’, vol. 1 (MS B59,1(1)).

99 For example, Esther Breitenbach describes how at Lovedale the missionaries instituted the abandonment of African forms of dancing and music, and urged their converts to ‘adopt a European work ethic’, which included ‘introducing them to different forms of cultivation and gardening, layout of settlements, and ways of building, the introduction of artisanal training, and the application of European technologies’. Breitenbach, ‘Scottish Encounters with Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, Africa in Scotland, Scotland in Africa: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Hybridities, ed. Afe Adogame and Andrew Lawrence (Boston, MA: Brill, 2014), 19–41 (p. 35).

100 Hodgson, Janet, Ntsikana’s ‘Great Hymn’: A Xhosa Expression of Christianity in the Early 19th Century Eastern Cape (Rondebosch: Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town, 1980)Google Scholar; Dave Dargie, ‘The Music of Ntsikana’, South African Journal of Musicology, 2 (1982), 7–28.

101 Preface to Hodgson, Ntsikana’s ‘Great Hymn’, 1.

102 Hodgson, Ntsikana’s ‘Great Hymn’, 19.

103 Ibid., 16. Hodgson does, however, conclude after much analysis (p. 74) that all transcriptions of the hymn show European influence.

104 Young, Robert, Trophies from African Heathenism (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1892), 215 Google Scholar.

105 Coleridge-Taylor, of course, had the benefit of ‘elite’ British musical education in staff notation, which Bokwe had never had, and so was placed on a higher rung of the social ladder than the colonial composer. See Green, Jeffrey P., ‘Perceptions of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on his Death (September 1912)’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 12 (1985), 321–52Google Scholar, and Jeffrey P. Green, ‘Reexamining the Early Years of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Composer’, Black Victorians / Black Victoriana, ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 39–51.

106 Young, Trophies from African Heathenism, 215.

107 See Masilela, Ntongela, ‘African Intellectual and Literary Responses to Colonial Modernity in South Africa’, Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous Southern African Responses to Colonialism, 1840–1930, ed. Peter Limb, Norman Etherington and Peter Midgley (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 245–76 (p. 246)Google Scholar.

108 See, for example, ibid., 250.

109 Sharkey, Heather J., American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ, and Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2 Google Scholar.

110 The influence of the world tours of the African American Fisk Jubilee Singers upon nineteenth-century black South African touring singing groups is traced in Zine Magube, ‘The Boundaries of Blackness: African American Culture and the Making of a Black Public Sphere in Colonial South Africa’, Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings, ed. Tarald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 212–32.

111 See John Knox Bokwe, ‘Notes of a Visit to Scotland’, Imvo Zabantsundu, 3 May 1893. Grant Olwage claims that Bokwe almost certainly did not tour with the choir, although he considered doing so and at one point asked for leave from Lovedale for this purpose. However, Olwage notes that as Bokwe was such a consistent record-keeper, his accompanying the choir would have been noted. By late 1892, when Bokwe finally reached Scotland, the choir’s tour had come to an end, so it is probable that he did not cross paths with them in Britain. Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 22. On this point, see also Lucia, The World of South African Music, 347 n. 339.

112 Erlmann, ‘“Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised”’, 167.

113 Ibid., 170.

114 ‘Although all of these titles were unmistakably South African, none could in fact be described as “native” in any sense. Rather, these songs were classics of a repertoire called makwaya (choir songs), a genre that was largely based upon the Western Baroque hymn.’ Ibid., 171.

115 See Musical Herald (1891), 216, and Musical Times (1891), 483.

116 John Knox Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale: Lovedale Music, 2nd edn (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1894).

117 Bokwe, ‘Preface’, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, i–ii (p. i).

118 Ibid.

119 The link between Victorian ideas of evolution, music pedagogy and tonic sol-fa notation is discussed by Zon, Bennett, Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 163–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 See Kennedy, David, Kennedy at the Cape: A Professional Tour through Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, the Diamond Fields, and Natal; A Section of ‘Singing Round the World’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Publishing Company, 1879)Google Scholar. This particular quotation is given as found in Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, back cover. Another testimonial to the Lovedale hymn collection appeared when the Revd Alexander Neil Somerville, D.D., during his evangelistic tour of South Africa in 1883, heard the hymn Msindisi Waboni, obtained a stand-alone copy and introduced it in Scotland metrically translated into English by his daughter, Mrs G. H. Knight Bearsden of Glasgow. The words and music (in staff notation) appeared in the Free Church Monthly in 1892. It was noted that ‘Messes Gall and Inglis, publishers, Edinburgh, sought and obtained on 1st June 1892, permission to use the music of Msindisi Waboni for their publication – “Hymns and Melodies” – which they issued, August, 1893’. Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, back cover.

121 Preface to Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, i.

122 Bokwe, John Knox, Amaculo ase Lovedale: Lovedale Music, 3rd edn (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1910)Google Scholar.

123 Musical Herald (1895), 95.

124 Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 22.

125 Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, 80.

126 A full transcription of this song into staff notation may be found in Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 23–4.

127 See press reviews and photographs in Erlmann, ‘“Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised”’, 170.

128 Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, 2nd edn, 81–4.

129 For example, although the Curwen Press, owing to the public demand for self-improvement through learning elite notation, published various manuals for tonic sol-fa students en route to staff notation, they always specified that knowledge of staff notation was more meaningful and concrete following a thorough knowledge and internalization of the solfège method. As John Spencer Curwen was to ascertain, prior knowledge of tonic sol-fa should eventually help the understanding of staff notation at a deeper level than if learning the (artificial) latter system first: ‘Tonic Sol-faists, it may be thought, will be completely at sea with a notation so different from their own. All the time they have spent in learning the new notation will, it may be supposed, be thrown away when they come to study the Staff. On the contrary, experience shows that all the knowledge they have gained will be of use; it will render their progress quicker, and make them more certain readers of Staff Notation.’ Curwen, John Spencer, A Staff Notation Primer for Tonic Sol-fa Pupils (London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency, 1882), 2 Google Scholar. See also the publication of his father, John Curwen, How to Observe Harmony, so as to Sing More Correctly, Consistently, and Pleasantly (London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency, 1861), which had several new editions published throughout the 1890s.

130 In the tonic sol-fa method, as taught to missionaries, this conception of the ‘lah’ note pictured as drooping was internalized from the first level of introductory singing for children through to advanced lessons, regardless of whether the posters of hand signs were available. See, for example, Curwen, John, The Art of Teaching, and the Teaching of Music: Being the Teacher’s Manual of the Tonic Sol-fa Method (London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency, 1875 Google Scholar), and Choir Training: An Elementary Course on the Tonic Sol-fa Method (London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency, 1878); and John Spencer Curwen, Intermediate Training for Choirs, upon the Tonic Sol-fa Method (London: J. Curwen & Sons, 1884). On the use and applicability of this system today, see Alan C. McClung, ‘Sight-Singing Scores of High School Choristers with Extensive Training in Movable Solfège Syllables and Curwen Hand Signs’, Journal of Research in Music Education, 56 (2008), 255–66.

131 Tonic sol-fa ‘modulators’, ranging in size from pocket-sized leaflets to six-foot posters, were published in the millions by the Curwen Press over the course of the nineteenth century as instructional aids to teaching music theory.

132 See, for example, Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially the section ‘Direct Contrasts of Mode’ (pp. 291–6).

133 ‘The Kaffirs do not appear to have any airs of their own’, noted the Kaffir Express in 1874. Cited in Grant Olwage, ‘Singing in the Victorian World: Tonic Sol-fa and Discourses of Religion, Science and Empire in the Cape Colony’, Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, 7 (2010), 208.

134 John Knox Bokwe, quoted in the Christian Express (1891), 150. Also cited in Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 26.

135 My use of the term ‘public examination’, of course, cannot be used without bringing to mind a Foucauldian approach to the set-up of the act of imperial examining as a discourse of power. I aim to shy away from a Foucauldian analysis of imperial musical knowledge construction in part, because I wish to create space for hearing acts of aesthetic agency on the part of the examinee – and, for that matter, the examiner (whether this concerns the individual or the imperial public). Nevertheless, ‘disciplining’, although through an aesthetic lens, was integral to the musical lives of both Taylor and Bokwe. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). On Foucault and musical discipline more specifically, see Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, ed. Bergeron and Bohlman (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–9.

136 See Olwage, ‘John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer’, 28.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid.

139 Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa, 358.

140 Ibid., 481.

141 Ibid.

142 South African Outlook (1938), 212.

143 Jacob Bradford, ‘The Staff Notation Versus the Tonic Sol-fa’, Musical News (1894), 195–6.

144 John Charles James Hoby, The South African School Sight Singing Method, Tonic Sol-fa and Staff (London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1904).

145 John Charles James Hoby, ‘Tonic Sol-fa at Durban’, Tonic Sol-fa Record (1904), 19.

146 On the persistence of tonic sol-fa as a means of black South African musical identity from the nineteenth century to the present day, see Robin Stevens, ‘Tonic Sol-fa: An Exogenous Aspect of South African Musical Identity’, Music and Identity, ed. Akrofi, Smit and Thorsén, 37–52.

147 Kirby, Wits End, 85.

148 Ibid.

149 Ibid., 86.

150 Ibid., referring to Stanford, Charles Villiers, The National Song Book: A Complete Collection of the Folk-Songs, Carols and Rounds Suggested by the Board of Education, 1905; Edited and Arranged for the Use of Schools by C. V. Stanford (London: Boosey & Co., 1906)Google Scholar.

151 Van der Linden, Music and Empire, 1–2, previously quoted at n. 17 above.