Anna Maria Busse Berger introduces her thoughtful new study by recounting a childhood experience that ultimately inspired her to write the book. Having recently arrived in Tanganyika as the daughter of a Moravian missionary, she witnessed nearby in the city of Mombasa, British Kenya (1888–1963), a choir singing Gregorian chant. ‘I could not believe how different [it] sounded’, she remarks, and from that moment, ‘my curiosity was aroused’ (p. 1). It is out of this wondrous encounter that Berger crafts a rich, nuanced analysis of a foundational moment in the making of modern musical thought. Turning away from arenas common to musicological investigations of modernism—above all, its art music and popular entertainment— Busse Berger examines how, during the early twentieth century, logics of medieval music’s ‘origins’ came to be entwined with ‘African musicality’, and, by extension, with religious conversion exercises in German East Africa. Some mission members were, it turns...