Globalization and Missionaries: Moravians, the Protestant Jesuits

Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 4:00pm CDT

McClintock Choral and Recital Room

Presented by Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor of Music, Emerita, University of California, Davis 

Anna Maria Busse Berger’s areas of expertise include medieval and Renaissance history and theory, historiography, and missionary music in Africa. Winner of the American Musicological Society’s Alfred Einstein Award for best article by a young scholar, she has held fellowships at prestigious institutions including the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the University of Vienna. Her book Medieval Music and the Art of Memory won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory. Her article “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s” won the American Musicological Society’s Colin Slim Award and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Bruno Nettl Prize. Together with Jesse Rodin, she co-edited the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, and her book The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961: Scholars, Singers, and Missionaries received another Bruno Nettl Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is co-editor of the flagship journal Archiv für Musikwissenschaft and was elected to the Directorium of the International Musicological Society for a five-year term.