I am speaking from St. Michael the Archangel Church in Penhurst, East Sussex, in the United Kingdom of late 2024. So adjacent and outside the expansionist missionary world, this place is as innocent as it is ignorant. Among the tens of thousands of churches dotting the British landscape, making up the vestiges of a staging ground for international cultural domination.
The foundations of imposing colonial rule bring the people into a space designated for changing minds and hearts. The church is as much a ubiquitous building, whether wood, stone or daub, as it is a force, slow-moving and considered, and by extension the church organ has been central to wider cultural takeover. Faith unites, and to turn, to subsume a populace, they were to be united under faith. The Christian church, altar in front and organ behind, forms an enclosure.
This audio paper will explore the smothering cultural effect of missionaries’ introduction of the church organ as a tool in a wing of colonial measures, and its proponents’ efforts to multiply international influence and suppress indigenous sounding through its use.
‘The organ has always been considered, and rightly so, the king of musical instruments, because it takes up all the sounds of creation… The organ’s great range of timbre, from piano through to a thundering fortissimo, makes it an instrument superior to all others… The manifold possibilities of the organ in some way remind us of the immensity and the magnificence of God.’
So said Pope Benedict XVI at Alte Kapelle in Regensburg, Germany on 13th of September 2006, blessing the installation of a new organ. Recurrent through histories of the church organ’s distribution through the Christianised world, and the ongoing collaborative processes uniting Christian conversion with colonisation, is the perceived supremacy imbued within the instrument. A superior belief system manifest through music, projected not just to Heaven, but to the indigenous peoples missionaries encountered. Thereby creating grounds to forcibly supersede those groups missionaries considered lost or heathen, enabled by song. Storch (2012, pp. 224) relays how Francisco Cabral, superstitious xenophobe and Portuguese Franciscan missionary, on his ‘first journey to India, where he arrived on 13 September 1500, was already accompanied by eight Franciscans; among them was the organ player Frei Matteu, who is said to have been able to play an organ on one of the ships.’
This organ music, the hymnals it accompanied, were not purely worshipful, but extensively functionalised music. Songs of convincing, modalities of control. Providing those scarred by the colonisers with a ritual security, in a cycle of violence and spiritual emancipation designed wholly by the coloniser. In this case, the organ’s reliability as an export is conveyed, on long voyages and in foreign climates, its robustness ensured its longevity of use. For Cabral and the Franciscans, prolific missionaries active in widespread colonisation in the Americas and Asia, the organ’s vibrational resonance provided a strong footing to gather the unconverted in union.
An eminent interlocutor enabling the church organ as a colonial tool was Christian Ignatius Latrobe, active in the nineteenth century Moravian Church. Latrobe worked to construct a self-replicating network of Christian colonial missions, encouraging indigenous dependence on settler missionaries, where the natives’ survival depended on the assimilation conversion brought. Dodds (2023, pp. 77) observes: ‘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 violent outlawing of existing musical practices and styles.’
Latrobe’s didactic, standardised organ arrangement and performance modes furthered his envisioned homophonic uniformity of congregational control. Materially, his export of a European organ was crucial to furthering colonial aims. Independent of local resources and means of instrument manufacture, not only would the organ gain wider influence as the congregation inevitably grew, but also expedite the dying out of local instrument-making skills and song. Marrying with the coercive brutality of the colonialist practice of suppression, was the church’s conscious imbuing of the organ with a sacred character.
Christian colonists mythologised the organ as manifesting the voice of God in music, the physical sensations it could summon across its broad frequency range lending credence to their assertions. On the organ player’s control over a congregation, Latrobe’s son, John Antes (1831, pp. 366) colourfully illustrated; ‘According to the tenor of his performance, their minds may be solemnized or dissipated, their devotion elevated or repressed, their thoughts sublimed or secularized. He holds over them an enchanter’s wand, powerful as the lightning, and almost equally destructive.’ This empirical, mythic characterisation harkens back to the organ’s history framed as a theophanic force, a catalyst for religious subjugation. Aligning with this, Jasen (2016, pp. 99) writes how ‘it would have also confronted non-participants and non-believers – those not in the church but in its proximity, permeated by modulations – with a striking, perceptual encounter combined with the promise/threat of something altogether more transformative ‘inside’.’ From a marginalised, native perspective, how could this new, purportedly sacred building be resisted when it resonated with the very voice of a God? A scale and formation of sounds fundamentally unheard of, or felt, prior to the arrival of the missionaries.
However, outright assumption that indigenous assimilation was corollary to the organ and church sound culture applying purely duress would be too simplistic. Eyerly (2020, pp. 11) states, ‘Although Moravian hymn singing and the soundscapes of mission communities were a form of colonialism, on an individual and community level, people were modifying hymns and adapting them. Native Moravians were not passive actors enmeshed in colonial processes.’ Assessing the impact of the church sound culture on an individual basis is complex. Native populaces’ lexicon was adaptive, in their interval merging with Christianity. Yet is this not the success of the self-replicating model Latrobe sought to instil? The natural progression in conducting cultural change on the scale Latrobe envisioned, lead to the enlistment of the local populace through training to play the organ. Irrespective of whether missionaries were subject to external threats of their own, or the organic adoption and adaptation of hymnals by native congregations, the placement and use of the church organ in these territories represents an act of orchestrated, colonial erasure of pre-existing culture.
Colonial missionaries like the Franciscans and Latrobe of the Moravians expressly denoted their own supremacy and requirement of expansion and replication in order to leverage influence, and the export of the church organ provided them with a unifier; a sonic monolith under which non-believers could be aligned and transformed to their will. This deliberate enmeshing of the organ’s theosophic, magnificently resonant character ascribed to it throughout Christian history with colonialist suppression of indigenous language, song and worship practices left native populaces with little choice but assimilation.
Engaging with the organ’s hymn became an act of survival; those from the Cherokee in Pennsylvania, the Mi’kmaq in Labrador or the Khoisan of South Africa for instance, were shepherded into conversion in the pursuit of a land grab. Organ music accompanied their shedding of instruments, songs, performance conventions, ways of life, violently discouraged and destructively replaced in the ancient, now-transformed, sacred sonic landscape; supplanted by the church organ.
Bibliography:
Montagu, J. (1979) The World of Baroque & Classical Musical Instruments. Great Britain: David & Charles Limited.
Pope Benedict XVI (2006) Apostolic Journey of his Holiness Benedict XVI to München, Altötting and Regensburg (September 9-14, 2006) Blessing of the New Organ, Greetings of the Holy Father [speech]. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060913_alte-kapelle-regensburg.html (Accessed: 16 November 2024).
Storch, C. (2012) ‘How the Pagans Became ‘Convinced’ About Christianity: Four Conclusions on the Relationship Between Music and the Missions in Early Colonialism’, in M. d. R. G. Santos and E. M. Lessa (eds) Música Discurso Poder. Minho, Portugal: Universidade do Minho Centro de Estudos Humanísticos.
Dodds, P. (2023) Music and the Cultural Production of Scale. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36283-5 (Accessed: 17 October 2024)
Latrobe, J. A. (1831) The Music of the Church Considered in its Various Branches, Congregational and Choral: An Historical and Practical Treatise for the General Reader. London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside.
Bergland, B. A. (2010) Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960. Edited by B. Reeves-Ellington, K. K. Sklar and C. A. Shemo.
Jasen, P. C. (2016) Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.