ABSTRACT
The most common variety of musician—the obscure, un-memorialized, non-celebrity learner, teacher, or performer of music (though perhaps even virtuosic in their own right)—is the “unremarkable musician,” a term coined by David Gramit. Ruth Finnegan calls them “hidden musicians,” and Bruno Nettl refers to the “ordinary musician”. The music brought with missionaries was part of both European and North American colonial systems, and the work of musical missionaries often passed Chinese musics through a white racial framework. This is not to say that the missionary presence was monolithic, but the vast majority of foreign missionaries in China were, at this time, ethnically white. The working copy of Hooper’s volumes describe a variety of situations from which she collected melodies, and even for which communities she arranged her works.
