Whether actively keeping together in time, or simply being together in time through
the uniting force of a common music--such as an anthem, or other type of group
song--the potential of musicality and musical communication for collective identity
cannot be overstated, though it is often overlooked.

7 Sociological studies of collective action and collective violence by Randall Collins, Charles Tilly and others provide ample theoretical underpinnings as regards the importance of group structure, group dynamics, and group rituals in the enabling of group violence.⁸ Here, for example, is Collins' description of what he terms solidarity rituals, which he regards as fundamental for understanding the dynamism of social movements:

> The ingredients are: first, assembling people bodily in the same place, so that they are in full multi-modal intercommunication; second, focusing their attention on the same thing and becoming mutually aware of each other's focus, thereby generating a sense of intersubjectivity; and third, feeling and expressing the same emotion. Interaction rituals can succeed or fail, can be intense or mediocre; if the ingredients pass a threshold, mutual focus and shared emotion feed back into each other, driving them upwards to high levels of rhythmic entrainment that Durkheim called collective effervescence. At these high levels, what the group focuses upon becomes symbolic, representing membership in the group as well as depicting its boundaries and enemies. Individuals are filled with emotional energy, the feelings of confidence and enthusiasm that motivate them to acts of heroism and sacrifice. They are filled with a sense of morality, the palpable experience of good and its fight against evil.⁹

8 It is easy to see how music fits into this muster, though it is not something that Collins appears to have considered—and in this, he is far from alone. Nevertheless, along with the anthropology of war and armed conflict, studies like these are highlighting the multifaceted performativity of war, and the communicative nature of violence itself.¹⁰ Such research is also a plea for a greater understanding of the cultural contingency of acts of violence: this includes how certain acts come to be defined as violence while others do not, and how some forms of violence, in some situations, become morally or legally acceptable while others remain outside accepted codes of behaviour.¹¹ In this normative sense, too, violence and the collective come to be linked.

9 War is a case in point of how cultures sanction and enable acts that in other contexts would be deemed illegal, while simultaneously struggling to contain them within these contexts. Many researchers—including Collins—have argued that the act of inflicting serious violence on another human being is in most cases profoundly unnatural;¹² and while there are significant exceptions to this rule, the very existence of so many and such complex cultural systems and practices for organising, justifying and mythologising war—and very often, this includes drawing attention as far as possible away from the act of killing at war’s heart—is just one indication of how high the stakes are. The fact that war is brutal, and at the same time highly ritualised, is not a contradiction: rituals enable the brutality (both in the sense of inflicting it, but also subjecting oneself to it), and ritual is also needed to contain the brutality and give it meaning. Hence the large number of rituals of war which historically have marked off the combat zone as a separate, even liminal space, and mark combatants themselves off from civilians. Hence, too, the importance of collective honouring of those who have fought, and in particular, those who have acted bravely or killed most effectively within the agreed limits, and those who themselves were killed. Notably, rituals of war in the modern world have not yet caught up with the fact that since the twentieth
century, more civilians than combatants have died in war; in fact, as I have argued elsewhere, the demise in many of these rituals and the dramatic changes in attitudes to civilians in war that lead to these statistics may be linked.¹³

10 From the perspective of music sociology, music can function as a catalyst, a channel and a frame for collective experience and meaning-making. And these capacities of musical activities and practices are what make them such important strategic tools before, during, and after war. Without giving special significance to the act of killing in war, and without consecrating death in war as the supreme sacrifice—even the term reeks of ritual—wars could hardly be justified. On a more directly strategic level, rituals which mark off and give meaning to combat are essential psychological responses to the trauma combat almost inevitably entails; and, where music is used on the battlefield itself—as was once common—it can serve as a focus and as an ordering mechanism which keeps troops together in the very moment when they are most likely to succumb to panic.¹⁴ Long after ceasefire, music continues to play an oftentimes fundamental role in celebrating or commemorating wars and warriors, thus functioning as a fundamental toolkit for collective memory which itself, all too often, becomes mobilised in the service of wars yet to come.

11 To focus on music as a framing and ordering device, and on its roles in meaning-making; to situate music's effects squarely within the context of collective identity and collective action; in other words, to understand the connection between music and war *socially*: this flies in the face of a tendency still found in some discussions of music and war to emphasise the brute force qualities of musical sound itself. Neoplatonic, magic bullet-style causal explanations which attribute to music the ability to trigger or unleash certain emotions (such as aggression) which are regarded as essential for committing acts of violence (they are not) can be understood as an attempt to distance ourselves, and music, from the fact that war is an integral part of our civilisation, and that more often than not it abides by civilisation's codes (codes that, after all, allow for war and often actively promote it). There are societies without war, but most of what passes in the past and present for “great” civilisations have been profoundly martial in nature. Western musical aesthetics have conspired to create the idea of a divide between a cultured, rational taste for music, and the way in which “lower” classes and races react to music: instinctively, emotionally. In the prevailing ideology of western civilisation, such a division between this civilised “us” and a barbarian “other” is often propagated in times of war, but also filters through into how we think about music and its relationship to action more generally.

12 An approach to the musicology of war which, in Kaden's sense, is both historical and systematic, is well placed to contribute to the wider project of understanding how we came to be so dependent on war for our ideas of who we are; for our economic systems; and for our activities in the fields of art and culture. A historical and comparative perspective on this issue seems to me particularly pertinent, and the historical record certainly makes it abundantly clear that, as far back as we can see, where there is war there is also music. And why should this surprise us, since both are such integral aspects of human society?
BIBLIOGRAPHY

COLLINS Randall, *Violence: A Sociological Theory*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008.

COLLINS Randall, "Time-bubbles of Nationalism: Dynamics of Solidarity Ritual in Lived Time", *Nations and Nationalism*, vol. 18, no. (3), 2012, pp. 383-397.

GRANT M. J., "Musical Communication, 'Hate Speech', and Human Rights Law", GEPHART Werner, LEKO Jure (eds.), *Law and the Arts: Elective Affinities and Relationships of Tension*, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2017, pp. 217-250.

GRANT M. J., "Bagpipes at the Front: Pipers and Piping During Combat in the Great War", SCHRAMM Michael (ed.), *Militärmusik und Erster Weltkrieg*, Bonn, Militärmusikzentrum der Bundeswehr, 2015, pp. 35-67.

GRANT M. J., "Chaos and Order: Issues in the Historiography of Martial Music", STROHM Reinhard (ed.), *Transcultural Music History: Global Participation and Regional Diversity in the Modern Age*, Berlin, Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag (forthcoming).

JACKMAN Mary, "Violence in Social Life", *Annual Review of Sociology*, vol. 28, 2002, pp. 387-415.

KALISCH Volker, HERR Corinna, "Positionspapier der Fachgruppe Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Musik", https://www.musikforschung.de/index.php/en/field-units/soziologie-und-sozialgeschichte-der-musik/183-positionspapier-der-fachgruppe-soziologie-und-sozialgeschichte-der-musik, accessed 30 August 2019.

SCHRÖDER Ingo W., SCHMIDT Bettina E., "Introduction: Violent Imaginaries and Violent Practices", SCHMIDT Bettina E., SCHRÖDER Ingo W. (eds.), *Anthropology of Violence and Conflict*, London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 1-24.

STROUD Joe, "The Importance of Music to Anders Behring Breivik", *Journal of Terrorism Research*, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013, pp. 5-18.

TILLY Charles, *The Politics of Collective Violence*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

NOTES

1. I say "explicitly political" because musicology and its disciplinary forebears have always been underpinned by political beliefs and agendas, no more so than when they deny any link at all between music and the political.

2. Christian Kaden, quoted in KALISCH Volker, HERR Corinna, "Positionspapier der Fachgruppe Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Musik", https://www.musikforschung.de/index.php/en/field-units/soziologie-und-sozialgeschichte-der-musik/183-positionspapier-der-fachgruppe-soziologie-und-sozialgeschichte-der-musik, accessed 30 August 2019; my translation.

3. KALISCH and HERR, "Positionspapier", my translation.

4. A pertinent example is the speed with which the doctrine of Christianity was adapted to make it amenable to the warrior cultures of Europe, cultures in which performance in war was integral to the honour system of the nobility.

5. STROUD Joe, "The Importance of Music to Anders Behring Breivik", *Journal of Terrorism Research*, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013, pp. 5-18.
6. For a fuller discussion of this issue as it pertains to racist violence, see GRANT M. J., "Musical Communication, 'Hate Speech', and Human Rights Law", GEPHART Werner, LEKO Jure (eds.), *Law and the Arts: Elective Affinities and Relationships of Tension*, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2017, pp. 217-250.

7. Entrainment here refers to the ways in which processes come into time with one another. Humans appear to be almost unique in the animal kingdom in the way they frequently and proactively act in time with others, especially in the behaviours we call music (and closely related activities, especially dance). Entrainment however more properly refers to how at subconscious levels as well, our bodily systems come into synch with one another and how we unconsciously and not just consciously come "into time" with others in our presence. Processes of keeping in time with others have proved fundamentally important in the context of martial and military organisations, as the prevalence of war dances and their modern western equivalents, marching and drill, testify.

8. COLLINS Randall, *Violence: A Sociological Theory*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008; "Time-bubbles of Nationalism: Dynamics of Solidarity Ritual in Lived Time", *Nations and Nationalism*, vol. 18, no. (3), 2012, pp. 383-397; TILLY Charles, *The Politics of Collective Violence*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

9. COLLINS, "Time-bubbles of nationalism", p. 387.

10. See here especially SCHRÖDER Ingo W., SCHMIDT Bettina E., "Introduction: Violent Imaginaries and Violent Practices", SCHMIDT Bettina E., SCHRÖDER Ingo W. (eds.), *Anthropology of Violence and Conflict*, London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 1-24.

11. JACKMAN Mary, "Violence in Social Life", *Annual Review of Sociology*, vol. 28, 2002, pp. 387-415.

12. An exception is that inflicting violence on one perceived as weaker appears to be much easier than inflicting it on one of equal strength or standing. Collins recognises this, but does not, in my opinion, sufficiently consider the broader significance of this in light of what we know to be high levels of relationship violence and violence against children. This is too complex a topic to enter into here, except to say that a mix of innate and cultural factors may be at play here: to attack the weak makes sense in terms of personal survival, but who is encoded as "weak" or subordinate/inferior is culturally conditioned.

13. GRANT M. J., "Chaos and Order: Issues in the Historiography of Martial Music", STROHM Reinhard (ed.), *Transcultural Music History: Global Participation and Regional Diversity in the Modern Age*, Berlin, Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag (forthcoming).

14. GRANT M. J., "Bagpipes at the Front: Pipers and Piping During Combat in the Great War", SCHRÄMM Michael (ed.), *Militärmusik und Erster Weltkrieg*, Bonn, Militärmusikzentrum der Bundeswehr, 2015, pp. 35-67; GRANT M. J., "Chaos and Order".
ABSTRACTS

The musicology of war and collective violence is a relatively young field, and appropriate
theoretical frameworks for this research are still emerging. Here, an approach is outlined which,
in keeping with the programme for music sociology outlined by Christian Kaden, is both
systematic and historical in its approach. Perspectives from the sociology of violence (Randalls
Collins, Charles Tilly) can help us understand the dynamics of collective violence, and thus the
role of music within it. War is a cultural rather than natural phenomenon, and music plays
significant roles in the rituals which enable wars to happen.

La musicologie de la guerre et de la violence collective est un champ d'étude relativement jeune, et les cadres théoriques ajustés à ces recherches sont encore en cours d'élaboration. Ici, une approche à la fois systématique et historique est esquissée, conformément au programme de sociologie de la musique proposé par Christian Kaden. Les perspectives de la sociologie de la violence (Randall Collins, Charles Tilly) peuvent nous aider à comprendre la dynamique de la violence collective et, par-là, le rôle qu'y joue la musique. La guerre est un phénomène culturel plutôt que naturel et la musique remplit des fonctions importantes dans les rituels qui permettent aux guerres de se produire.

INDEX

**Mots-clés:** guerre, violence collective, sociologie de la musique, sociologie de la violence, anthropologie de la guerre, rituels de guerre

**Keywords:** war, collective violence, music sociology, sociology of violence, anthropology of war, rituals of war

AUTHOR

MORAG JOSEPHINE GRANT

M. J. Grant's current research interests focuses on the musicology of war and collective violence, including torture. Other interests include the social functions of songs and singing; new and experimental art music since 1950; music and law. From 2008-2014 she led the research group "Music, Conflict and the State" at the University of Göttingen. She has received multiple research awards and fellowships to support her work. She teaches musicology at the University of Edinburgh.
# Culprit or Accomplice: Observations on the Role and Perception of Music in Violent Contexts in the Sierra Leone War

Coupable ou complice : observations sur le rôle et la perception de la musique dans des contextes violents durant la guerre en Sierra Leone

Cornelia Nuxoll

1. In the 1990s, combatants of the Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front (RUF) often used music in the context of war to justify, prepare for, and accompany violent attacks. Diving deeper into this matter leads to further questions: Which were the songs that became part of the “rebel soundtrack” and what was their appeal to the RUF? Was music an accessory to or the driving force behind their violent actions? And how do the musicians who released the songs, as well as the civilians who fell victim to violent strategies involving these songs, view the rebels’ appropriation of music for war?

## Innocuous or Dangerous: Agency of Music

2. When I began to study the role and impact of music in conflict situations and the way music may be used to incite, accompany and legitimise violence, my research focus was time and again met with some resistance. The idea that music could be used for ulterior motives stands in stark contrast to the widely held notion that music is intrinsically good, an all-time positive force and a unifying, universal language. On the other hand, it has been suggested that listening to certain types of music with “violent lyrics” ultimately causes aggressive behaviour in the listener. Based on my field research in post-war Sierra Leone, music used in war does not necessarily have to be perceived as either good or bad. Rather, former combatants, civilians and musicians positioned music in a neutral way, looking beyond its appropriation in the context of violence in order to preserve their relationship with it.
3

As Tia DeNora and others have pointed out, people turn to music as a framing device and mood regulator. It is often used as an enhancer (or diffuser), playing into and amplifying (or dispelling) the listener's emotional disposition. Music provides resources to connect and reconnect with oneself and one's emotions. However, it is not music alone or any intrinsic property it contains that acts as a causal stimulus that creates or changes emotions in a person. Instead, music's effect is attributable: its power cannot be abstracted from the context in which it is used and experienced. Music is a resource that people utilise to gain access to emotional experiences and responses as they look for and deal with dormant issues not yet fully grasped or negotiated.¹ Music is considered an agentive force because engaging with it facilitates a state of “entrainment” in which the listener ascribes perceived meanings and purpose to the musical material.² The structuring properties of music allow it to form a significant constitutive means of human action and provide a resource through which personal and social lives can be configured. Music can be used to foster critical consciousness. It may also serve as a referent for action and an ordering device that organises its listeners and performers in real time.³

4

Over the past fifteen years or so, musicological research increasingly addressed the question of music's effective use in post-conflict settings as a tool for peace and reconciliation as well as in processes of nation-building and commemoration. At the same time, there is an increasing amount of studies recognising the use of music as a means of mobilisation and propaganda, and inciting or accompanying violence. Both research approaches assume that music can be instrumentalised to activate as well as intensify the feelings, intentions, and actions of those who hear it or make it. In other words, music is a tool that can be used for belligerent and peaceful means alike.⁴

5

The following discusses some observations on the role of music made through my fieldwork among the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of the Sierra Leonean civil war that took place from 1991 to 2002.

## Reminiscing about Music after the War: Fieldwork Observations

6

After decades of increasing state decline due to bad governance, political corruption and economic failure, the newly-formed rebel group RUF attempted to topple the then ruling government. Mostly comprised of disenfranchised young men striving to improve their own and the country's socio-economic conditions, the RUF movement gained some initial sympathy and support from civilians. For various reasons, however, the RUF very soon no longer pursued its political agenda and resorted to indiscriminate violence, brutal robberies, and forced recruitment to sustain itself, which resulted in the complete loss of civilian support. Numerous power changes and various collusive alliances later, the Sierra Leone conflict – by now widely labelled a “senseless war”⁵ infamous for its atrocities, blood diamonds and widespread use of underage combatants – was officially declared over in 2002.⁶

7

Producing only losers, civilians bore the brunt of this conflict, with tens of thousands dead, many more displaced, no significant change in politics and a destroyed infrastructure. Until today, many of the root causes of the war remain disturbingly unresolved and most former RUF members never returned home to their families.
Instead, they chose to live in anonymity in the bigger cities to avoid any stigmatisation for their active involvement in the war. Although rank and file combatants were granted amnesty after the war, many feared indictments, self-incrimination, retribution and other negative exposure because of their affiliation with the rebel group. When I began my field research in Sierra Leone, there was a concern that former RUF members would be unwilling to engage in dialogue for fear of reprisals.

8. Early on, however, I realised that the music focus of my research served as a sort of door opener. The emphasis on the role of music and not on the atrocities during the war seemed to present my research in an innocent, benign, perhaps even trivially insignificant context to my interlocutors. My interactions did not necessarily require detailed descriptions of war crimes and human rights violations to obtain information on the role of music among RUF members.

9. During my interviews, I further stressed my focus on music to my interlocutors to make them feel more at ease, in the hope that this approach would obtain sincere answers rather than prompting defensive or face-saving behaviour. Equally important, however, I wanted to avoid that my research would cause participants to relive potentially distressing and traumatic experiences as perpetrators or victims.

10. At the outset, my request to speak about music was met with some initial astonishment. At the same time, it was evident how – given the topic – former RUF members visibly relaxed and even enjoyed speaking about this topic precisely because they felt that our conversation was going to be “just about music.” It was also apparent that most former rebel fighters had not given music much thought whenever they had looked back on the war before. Once they shifted their focus towards it, however, music swiftly resonated with them as an integral part of the war experience. In conversations with former RUF members, it was striking to see how reminiscing about relevant songs triggered vivid memories of their time as combatants. Discussing the songs that were popular with the RUF notably energised and enthused my interlocutors, the joint singing of commando songs made them smile, generated feelings of past camaraderie, prompting them to be more engaged in group interviews. Their emotional response to remembering and performing some songs ultimately provided me with a better understanding of music’s impact during the war years.

11. During interviews, former RUF fighters mentioned specific music genres and songs they listened to that inspired or educated them. They also spoke of commando songs they performed during military training. Over time, my interlocutors brought up more sensitive topics, widening the scope of the role and function of music during the war. As I will discuss in the following section, they gave music examples linked to strong-arm tactics and combat action, songs the rebels appropriated as a weapon, or used as an accompaniment to execute violent attacks.

12. The music-focused research proved beneficial in at least two ways: the seemingly “innocuous” nature of the project allowed me easier access to former RUF combatants and helped improve their willingness to share their war experiences with me. At the same time, music served as an excellent means to trigger memories, not only of songs that were meaningful to them at the time, but also of the situations they were in and the emotions they felt when they played and heard these songs again.
Music and Violence through the Eyes of Perpetrators,
Victims and Musicians

13 In the following, I would like to explore another aspect of the use of music during the conflict, viewed through the eyes of the perpetrator, victim and musician. To give more context, I will briefly introduce some of the musical genres that were most relevant to RUF forces, and why.⁷ I will then discuss how rebels, civilians and the respective artists alike perceive this music linked to violence.

14 Roots reggae was by far the most preferred music genre among early RUF members. Songs like Bob Marley's *War* and *The Real Situation, It's Not a Crime* by Burning Spear or *House of Exile* by Lucky Dube were described as educational and highly motivating. When former combatants listened to the socially critical lyrics of the songs, they saw many parallels to injustices in their own country and interpreted them as justification to take up arms. For RUF combatants who joined the movement at the beginning, reggae offered a vital source for fostering identities as revolutionary freedom fighters. Many felt that engaging with countercultural music that was also associated with the struggle against Apartheid, was already a political act. They felt that many of the songs had instructive and educational components that raised their awareness for socio-economic grievances and oppressive political systems. They discussed and interpreted the lyrics amongst each other and aligned them with the political situation in Sierra Leone, with the result that the use of violence in the name of revolutionary resistance was considered necessary and legitimate.

15 In the context of combat action and executing attacks, the RUF made use of some of the songs of popular local musicians Ahmed Janka Nabay and Steady Bongo. Steady Bongo is what Sierra Leoneans commonly refer to as a “cultural musician” who composes songs that often convey traditional values and moral lessons. During the war, he released several albums and was an instrumental figure in the transitional demobilisation and reconciliation process throughout the post-war period. Touring the hinterland with peace concerts, Bongo performed songs that promoted peace and unity, and his live shows helped to ease tensions between opposing factions. RUF forces enjoyed listening to Steady Bongo even though many of songs condemned the war in general, and rebel conduct in particular. *Eeh en* was a popular song on love, love-making and the dangers of womanising. However, during the war, the song *Eeh En* was part of rebel attacks. Due to its “rousing cultural beat”, former RUF fighters recounted how some of the boldest combatants played it as a personal soundtrack over headphones on portable cassette players while moving into battle, keeping in time with the song’s rhythm, pumping themselves up and getting ready to fight. It is interesting to note how combatants turned to music as an external source of energy to transform them into what the situation required of them.

16 Similarly, and while advancing on targets, RUF forces would play the fast and rhythmically complex Bubu songs by the late singer Ahmed Janka Nabay. Done to confuse, and tempt them out of their houses in order to surround and capture them more easily, local inhabitants were subjected to the loud sound blasting of Nabay's music during village attacks. On other occasions, the rebels sang new lyrics on top of Nabay's songs playing over portable boomboxes. They changed some of the original Bubu lyrics, stripping them of their intended message to suit their agenda, now claiming that the RUF was winning the war and that villagers should join the rebel
force. The appropriation of these songs was not only a deceptive manoeuvre to expose civilians to psychological stress and lure them out, but it was also a ploy to utilize the same music against the very people Nabay's songs were intended to lend moral support to and promote perseverance in difficult times.

17 These three music examples represent only a small sample of songs that were used by RUF forces to legitimise, prepare for and accompany violence. Reggae music served as a means to reinforce their political ideology and vindicate their violent response to failed politics. Steady Bongo's rhythmic song helped combatants to generate a certain state of mind to forge ahead and get ready for close combat, harden them as fighters and contain emotions of fear. Janka Nabay's Bubu music was instrumentalised as a tactical and psychological weapon to deceive and terrorise civilians during raids, robbing them of the very songs that were supposed to help them withstand the brutality of the war.

18 All parties involved in or affected by these strategies – namely RUF forces, civilians and the artists themselves – acknowledge that music was weaponised in the context of violence. Interestingly though, all agents ascribe neutrality, if not a certain sense of “purity” to the different musics in question. During interviews with former RUF combatants, we would discuss whether reggae music incited violence in any way. Former RUF members responded by saying:

> Violent? Violent? No, no, no. Reggae is part of life and of course, like I said earlier, it inspires zeal and that is revealing maybe your right to you [...], how things should go. Things should go this way, and maybe if you relate that kind of situation to the prevailing situation in your country, you see where the truth lies. Something like that (Interview with M., Kailahun, November 13, 2010).

> Actually, it [reggae] doesn't call for violence, it has a message, something like advocates [sic], it is not about calling for violence, but it calls your mind to reflect [...] it was not about calling you to engage yourself in violence actually, it was only unfortunate because of the war, so that people who decided to reflect, find their own ways and means of bringing agency to the system, but it is not about engaging you or making you to engage yourself into violence; it is about telling you to know your right [...] it's about advocacy. It is not about 'the music was right there and used to inspire people to go into rampage and all whatsoever'..., no, it is about knowing your right and exactly know what to do (Interview with S.J., Kailahun, November 10, 2010).

19 The comments show that reggae was not a direct call to inflict violence, but an important framing device to revaluate their actions. Reggae's capacity of raising awareness with regards to socio-political injustices facilitated violence as a legitimate means to rectify these inequities. Put more simply: Is roots reggae considered violent music? No. Can it be used to justify violent means? Yes.

20 In an interview with Steady Bongo, the musician shared his own ideas on why the rebels co-opted his music when they were advancing on the battlefield:

> So before we left [referring to a trip he made to a rebel stronghold], we went down to Super Sound [a music production studio in Freetown] and then we bought so many of my cassettes, CDs, you know, yeah, we put them in the Jeep that we were using. Because they [RUF] love my music so much, you know. Most of the time when they want to attack a village or a town, they always enter with a loud music and that is my music, you know. I did a track during the war, titled *Eeh En*, you know, *Eeh En* is about love making, you know, but the beat I gave, the music was a typical culture beat and danceable, you know, so it was easy for them to use this music. And this music was so popular, you know, so when they are moving, they move with that. They have the tape on their head [carrying portable cassette players and
headphones or boomboxes], all over, dancing..., they attack people, you know
(Interview with Lansana Sheriff, aka Steady Bongo, Freetown, October 28, 2010).

21 Steady Bongo neither seems upset, nor does he seem to condemn the rebels' use of his music during attacks. Instead, to him, it is the appeal of the music's "typical culture beat" that lends itself to the appropriation by rebels, which above all, tells him how popular he was and how good and relatable his music is. The context in which his music is played, what it is used for and by whom seems less relevant to Bongo than its overall popularity.⁸

22 One of my research assistants, a former soldier in the Sierra Leone army now living in Makeni, remembered the effect weaponised Bubu music had on a civilian who fell victim to one of the rebels' ploys:

> I have [know] an old woman. She can never forget this song because when they [the RUF] wanted to attack Kambia, they were playing this music on top of their head [carrying boomboxes]. They [the rebels] enter the people's churches, just people happy, it was Christmas time. Festive time. So the people, all of them joined [the rebels' party] and they thought it's good, not knowing that after ten, fifteen minutes... [he whispers and makes a gesture of something spreading out] [the rebels were] everywhere (Interview with A., Makeni, December 29, 2011).

23 Another civilian who experienced a similar attack pointed out that she could no longer listen to the Bubu songs for fear of being retraumatised. Nonetheless, she still has fond memories of the songs and stressed that she considers the late Janka Nabay an exceptional artist.

24 Music seems to trigger memories and conjure images more readily than most other stimuli. For former RUF combatants, remembering the war through music was a mostly positive affair. Even when used in the context of violence, reminiscing the songs that they sung or listened to typically brought back memories of the pleasure of the music itself and less of how it was used. Moreover, the collective singing of some songs recreated moments of camaraderie and a sense of belonging, prompting feelings of pride for having been revolutionaries fighting the good fight. In essence, reminding them of a time when they were driven and felt strong and fearless.

25 Until today, former RUF combatants still listen to reggae music and hold its profound messages in reverence. Janka Nabay's and Steady Bongo's songs are still considered classic hits. They may not actively listen to the cultural songs anymore. However, they also do not have any bad associations with any of these particular songs, even though, in hindsight, they are critical of their conduct in war and may regret the misappropriation of music for violent means. For those that suffered under the RUF's "musical manoeuvres," Janka Nabay's songs may be forever linked to the trauma they had to endure. Nonetheless, victims are perfectly capable of separating the music from the attack. Similarly, Sierra Leonean musicians Bongo and Nabay who learned about the appropriation of their songs, chose to take the instrumentalisation of their music as a sign of their popularity and disregarded its use for ulterior motives.

26 It is interesting to note that when former rebels, civilians, and musicians recall the war and music's role in it, they all are protective of the music. In order to maintain their own relationship and personal connection with music, they intuitively preserve music's neutrality by decontextualising it from its use. They do not hold the songs accountable for the abuse they either executed or suffered. Instead, rebels, civilians and musicians acknowledge music's presence in the context of violence, they recognise it has played its part and its use as a tool and weapon, but they dissociate music from the actual
assault, and in doing so, the music itself remains unscathed. Both victims and
perpetrators realise that even though music functioned as an amplification device, it is
not music that is to blame. However, there seems to be more at play, given that –
independently of each other – all parties concerned push to preserve music as
untarnished, no matter the circumstances. More research is needed to fully understand
why, perhaps, for Sierra Leoneans and humans more generally, music is too important
to discredit it or see it tainted in any way.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CUZICK Suzanne "Music as Torture/Music as Weapon", *Transcultural Music Review* 10, 2006, https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon.

CUZICK Suzanne "'You Are in a Place That Is out of the World...'': Music in the Detention Camps of the 'Global War on Terror'", *Journal of the Society for American Music*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26.

DENORA Tia, *Music-In-Action: Selected Essays in Sonic Ecology*, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011.

DENORA Tia, *Music in Everyday Life*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

DENORA Tia, *After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

DENOV Myriam, *Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

FAST Susan and PEGLEY Kip (eds.), *Music, Politics & Violence*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

FRITH Simon, "Music and Identity", HALL Stuart and DU GAY Paul (eds.), *Questions of Cultural Identity*, London, Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 108-127.

FRITH Simon, *Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

GBERIE Lansana, *A Dirty War in West Africa: The R.U.F. and the Destruction of Sierra Leone*, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005.

GRANT Morag J., "Musik im Dienst des Massenmords," *Musik und Gewalt*, BRÖCKER Marianne (ed.), Münster, Verlagshaus Monsenstein und Vannerdat, 2010, pp. 259-268.

GRANT Morag Josephine, "Bagpipes at the Front: Pipers and Piping during Combat in the Great War", SCHRÄMM Michael (ed.), *Militärmusik und Erster Weltkrieg*, Bonn, Militärmusikzentrum der Bundeswehr, 2015, pp. 35-67.

HIRSCH Lily E. "Weaponizing Classical Music: Crime Prevention and Symbolic Power in the Age of Repetition," *Journal of Popular Music Studies*, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007, pp. 342-358.

HIRSCH Lily E., "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? Music as Punishment in the United States Legal System", *Popular Music and Society*, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 35-53.

HOFFMAN Danny, *The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia*, Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 2011.
IBRAHIM Abdullah (ed.), *Between Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War*, Dakar, Codesria, 2004.

JOHNSON Bruce and CLOONAN Martin, "Killing Me Softly with His Song: An Initial Investigation into the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression", *Popular Music*, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27-39.

JOHNSON Bruce and CLOONAN Martin, *Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence*, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008.

KEEN David, *Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone*, Oxford, James Currey, 2005.

KING Nathaniel, *Conflict as Integration: Youth Aspiration to Personhood in the Teleology of Sierra Leone's 'Senseless War'*, Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007.

NUXOLL Cornelia, ""We listened to it because of the message.' Juvenile RUF Combatants and the Role of Music in the Sierra Leone Civil War"", *Music & Politics*, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0009.104

NUXOLL Cornelia "Borrowed Tunes. Commando and Morale Booster Songs in the Sierra Leone War", *Transposition*, no. 4, 2014. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4000/transposition.598

O'CONNELL John Morgan and CASTELO-BRANCO Salwa El-Shawan, *Music and Conflict*, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2010.

PETERS Krijn, *War and Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

RICHARDS Paul, *Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone*, Oxford, International African Institute, 1996.

SLOBODA John, "Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings", *Psychology of Music*, vol. 19, no. 2, 1991, pp. 110-120.

SLOBODA John, *Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.

TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION, *Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth & Reconciliation Commission*, vol. 3A, 2004.

URBAIN Olivier (ed.), *Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics*, London, I.B. Tauris, 2008.

## NOTES

<footnote n="1">1. See SLOBODA John, *Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; SLOBODA John, "Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings", *Psychology of Music*, vol. 19, no. 2, 1991, pp. 110-120; DENORA Tia, *Music in Everyday Life*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; FRITH Simon, "Music and Identity", HALL Stuart and DU GAY Paul (eds.), *Questions of Cultural Identity*, London, Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 108-127; FRITH Simon, *Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. DENORA, *Music in Everyday Life*, p. 94 ff.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. See DENORA, *Ibid.*; DENORA Tia, *Music-In-Action: Selected Essays in Sonic Ecology*, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011; DENORA Tia, *After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. See for example O'CONNELL John Morgan and CASTELO-BRANCO Salwa El-Shawan, *Music and Conflict*, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2010; URBAIN Olivier (ed.), *Music and Conflict Transformation*:</footnote>
Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London, I.B. Tauris, 2008; JOHNSON Bruce and CLOONAN Martin, "Killing Me Softly with His Song: An Initial Investigation into the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression", Popular Music, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27-39; JOHNSON Bruce and CLOONAN Martin, *Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence*, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008; CUZICK Suzanne "Music as Torture/Music as Weapon", *Transcultural Music Review* 10, 2006, https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon; CUZICK Suzanne "'You Are in a Place That Is out of the World...': Music in the Detention Camps of the 'Global War on Terror'", *Journal of the Society for American Music*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26; HIRSCH Lily E. "Weaponizing Classical Music: Crime Prevention and Symbolic Power in the Age of Repetition," *Journal of Popular Music Studies*, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007, pp. 342-358; HIRSCH Lily E., "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? Music as Punishment in the United States Legal System", *Popular Music and Society*, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 35-53; GRANT Morag J., "Musik im Dienst des Massenmords," *Musik und Gewalt*, BRÖCKER Marianne (ed.), Münster, Verlagshaus Monsenstein und Vannerdat, 2010, pp. 259-268; GRANT Morag Josephine, "Bagpipes at the Front: Pipers and Piping during Combat in the Great War", SCHRAMM Michael (ed.), *Militärmusik und Erster Weltkrieg*, Bonn, Militärmusikzentrum der Bundeswehr, 2015, pp. 35-67; FAST Susan and PEGLEY Kip (eds.), *Music, Politics & Violence*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

5. See for example IBRAHIM Abdullah (ed.), *Between Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War*, Dakar, Codesria, 2004; KING Nathaniel, *Conflict as Integration: Youth Aspiration to Personhood in the Teleology of Sierra Leone's 'Senseless War'*, Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007.

6. For a detailed analysis of the Sierra Leone war and its root causes, see for example RICHARDS Paul, *Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone*, Oxford, International African Institute, 1996; HOFFMAN Danny, *The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia*, Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 2011; PETERS Krijn, *War and Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011; KEEN David, *Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone*, Oxford, James Currey, 2005; GBERIE Lansana, *A Dirty War in West Africa: The R.U.F. and the Destruction of Sierra Leone*, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005; DENOV Myriam, *Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; IBRAHIM, *Between Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War*; TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION, *Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth & Reconciliation Commission*, vol. 3A, 2004.

7. I have discussed the role of roots reggae, Bubu music and commando songs among RUF combatants in more detail elsewhere: NUXOLL Cornelia, "'We listened to it because of the message.' Juvenile RUF Combatants and the Role of Music in the Sierra Leone Civil War", *Music & Politics*, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0009.104; NUXOLL Cornelia "Borrowed Tunes. Commando and Morale Booster Songs in the Sierra Leone War", *Transposition*, no. 4, 2014. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4000/transposition.598.

8. Ahmed Janka Nabay had a similar reaction to the appropriation of his music by RUF forces.

## ABSTRACTS

The article focuses on the role of music among RUF combatants fighting in the Sierra Leone civil war. It touches on some widely held notions of music and a general reluctance towards the idea that music can be instrumentalised for violent means. Furthermore, it will address in what way
the research focus on music was conducive to qualitative interview sessions and direct interactions with former RUF members. Special focus lies on the songs that inspired rebel fighters and how these songs were used to prepare for and accompany violent attacks. The article concludes by exploring and comparing how perpetrators, victims and musicians assess the appropriation of music in the context of violence and how they feel about the songs today.

L'article examine le rôle de la musique pour les combattants du RUF qui se battent dans la guerre civile en Sierra Leone. Il interroge certaines notions générales sur la musique ainsi que la réticence à l'idée que la musique puisse être instrumentalisée à des fins violentes. En outre, il explique de quelle manière le biais de la recherche sur la musique a été propice à des séances d'entretiens qualitatifs et à des interactions directes avec d'anciens membres du RUF. Il prête une attention particulière aux chansons qui ont inspiré les combattants rebelles et sur la façon dont ces chansons ont été utilisées pour préparer et accompagner des attaques violentes. L'article conclut en analysant et en comparant la façon dont les auteurs de violences, les victimes et les musiciens évaluent l'appropriation de la musique dans un contexte violent et ce qu'ils ressentent aujourd'hui à propos de ces chansons.

## INDEX

**Keywords:** Sierra Leone war, RUF, music, violence, music as a weapon, agency, fieldwork experiences, anthropology and music research

**Mots-clés:** guerre civile de la Sierra Leone, RUF, musique, violence, guerre, musique comme arme, agentivité, expériences de terrain, sociologie de la musique, anthropologie et recherche musicale

## AUTHOR

### CORNELIA NUXOLL

Cornelia Nuxoll is a social anthropologist with a focus on ethnomusicology in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently an independent scholar, she previously was a member of the interdisciplinary research group *Music, Conflict and the State* at the Georg August University of Göttingen in Germany, which focused on the role of music in promoting, facilitating and perpetuating violent responses to conflict settings and in connection with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Within the framework of her PhD thesis, she conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone on the role and impact of music among juvenile RUF combatants fighting in the Sierra Leone civil war.
# Sound, Music, War and Violence:
Listening from the Archive

## *Son, musique, guerre et violence : à l'écoute des archives*

### Annegret Fauser

<footnote n="1">1 Movies, video games, and television programs can take their audiences sonically and visually into the midst of battle and violence, offering vicarious experience through audiovisual mediation. Whether in *Saving Private Ryan* (1998) or the latest *Terminator* installment (*Dark Fate*, 2019), in the darkness of the movie theater—or in the comfort of home—soundscapes of violence have grown to be a meticulously curated experience.¹ Similarly, attempts to invoke the experience of battle can be found also in costumed re-enactments—for instance of the American Civil War or of the 1811 Louisiana slave rebellion—where just the right powder and weapons produce the sonic signature of a musket fired in battle, even if the balls are blanks.² These simulacra of sonic violence contrast with the silence of past trauma—the fragmented character of its material remnants, including its sonic traces, left scattered in archives. To confront the aurality of historical violence poses challenges for musicology not only because of the absence of recorded sound but also given the way audiovisual media have contributed to overwriting archival traces with their invented soundscapes.³ Listening from and through the archives, however, opens up ways to engage with the sound, music, and even silence of war and violence.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 This space of historic aurality, however, is one curated through scholarly intercession that poses theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges. A historiography of past violence depends simultaneously on scholars’ skills and their empathy, a willingness to face a past reality of death and trauma painstakingly pieced together from archives either absent—destroyed by perpetrators as a strategy of silencing their victims—or generated in retrospect, even if materials are already accumulated during a war, for instance by bureaucrats on either side of the conflict.⁴ But if the material traces in archives of violence provide significant challenges, the sonic side of war and its experience defy simple transposition and mediation. Rather, the silence of the archives opens a space for engagement that acknowledges from the outset the historical and</footnote>
experiential difference between the positionality of the scholar as mediator and the sonic experiences of violence by the dead bodies of those with whom scholars might consort in their research.⁵

3 Where, then, does the sonic reside in records of violence, and how may archives become sites of listening? Moreover, what media can form part of such a resource, especially prior to, or absent of, sound recordings? And finally, how do noise and music intersect in this context? These questions form the core of sound-centered approaches to violence in the past, unique in their scope compared to traditional historiographies of war and conflict.⁶ To what extent sound and violence are often inextricably intertwined both in experience and in memory has been the topic of research by scholars in music history, ethnomusicology, and music therapy. In what follows I will focus on traces of the sonic in war-related archives and discuss music as activity and experience, as well as sound and silence in the framework of war theaters—the very word as it is deployed in the English language already an emblem of the located specificity of battles and their soundscapes for all that their impact usually extended far beyond such boundaries.

4 Much archival material that might enable listening to war—even through a mediated imaginary—consists of paper (whether or not now in digital form), and some of it is in the form of compositions and evidence of their performance.⁷ All these traces share their ontological condition as mediated and mediating discourse networks (*Aufschreibesysteme*) interceding between past and present.⁸ The performance-studies scholar Diana Taylor set up a dialectic relationship between the archive as mediating discourse network and embodied experience by pointing out that “insofar as it constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the live,” while—at the same time—“embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it.”⁹ This dialectic tension might be resolved, in Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s words, through “an acoustically tuned exploration of the written archive,” an approach that reveals the entangled history of aural and archival practices.¹⁰ Translating this theoretical position into the musicological practice of listening from the archive would lead to privileging the experiential aspect of the sonic past as it is reflected in the material remnants gathered in such collections. It demands of the scholar not only to take seriously the individual and their experience, but also to understand the constructedness of the archive and its powers of mediation. By shifting the focus on the traces of audibility in the archivally curated material debris of war, these remnants are functioning as “legible representations of aural experience” not only in writing but also in musical notation and recording.¹¹

5 As archives are constructed entities, they privilege certain experiences over others. Whose voice and which musics are recorded in the archives reflects the value systems not only of past societies but also of current ones given the way access to collections is curated, for instance through finding aids. As I worked on the music of World War I and World War II, two aspects were particularly noticeable. First, despite the immense volume of archival materials, such institutions as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France were privileging the experiences of their own respective nations. And second, what was considered worthwhile to collect in these institutions were generally materials relating to the war-time experiences of white men, often neglecting those of women and of people of color. Unless recognized as such, this archival bias might find
an insidious reproduction in scholarly work. As I pointed out in the introduction to
*Sounds of War*, it takes deliberate effort to trace a multitude of voices in these archives.¹²

Among the most fundamental responsibilities of scholarship on music and war is to
respect and take seriously the experiential gap between a scholar's own musical
practice and that of the voices inscribed within the archives. Rather than offering too
quickly an assessment from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, it matters to
listen to what someone reported on their experience of war. If a young man deployed
during World War II in the Pacific wrote about the almost painful beauty of listening to
a symphonic broadcast on the deck of his navy ship, it meant something different from
hearing such music today in the safety of the concert hall or the home: "Above to hear
Toscanini with the NBC Symph. It's very, very seldom that I get the chance to hear
music + it sounded wonderful. Very satisfying + restful but at the same time causing
pangs of frustration."¹³ It would be so easy and glib to speak of Eurocentrism and to
address canonicity, whiteness, and hegemony; instead, listening from the archives
means to value the writer's experience in its own right and to pay attention to the
echoes of his embodied listening experience within the words written to his father—the
emotions alluded to, his joy at that restful moment provided by the broadcast, and the
unspecified experience of frustration. This short glimpse into hearing symphonic music
in a war theater—the serendipity and rarity of the experience—speaks to how music
might displace, at least for the time that it lasts, the everyday encounters of warfare
and combat into a “restful” albeit exceptional sonic experience.

That music can offer a shift, through organized sound, into a calmer mental and
emotional space has long been part of musical discourse networks.¹⁴ In the context of
war and violence, this aspect of musicking plays a crucial role, whether in the
experience of individual soldiers or that of groups subjected to precarious conditions of
combat or other forms of violence. Yet this cognitive shift through music has also been
instrumentalized in retrospective forms of engagement with violence, through
commemoration and re-enactments. Even “battle” pieces composed close to the
conflict itself—Claude Janequin’s “La Guerre” (“La Bataille de Marignan”), Ludwig van
Beethoven’s *Wellington’s Victory*, or Marc Blitzstein’s *Airborne Symphony*—transpose the
actual experience of sound and violence into a memory regime that can overwrite past
or present experience through sonic reconfiguration.¹⁵ Appropriating previous musical
works into acts of commemoration also diverts their purpose, whether in the case of
“wartime pieces”—as with Edward Elgar’s *The Spirit of England* (1917), used in the service
of remembrance on Armistice Day through an annual broadcast on BBC radio—or those
with no such prior connotation (Samuel Barber’s *Adagio for Strings*), relying on pathos to
overlay any sonic traces that might remain from actual acts of violence.¹⁶ Yet Elgar’s
work fulfills an important role in configuring wartime trauma as heroic suffering, thus
smothering through its very musical language any contradictory experiences by
contributing to the fashioning of a normative and hegemonic narrative of national
unity and Britishness. In this respect, *The Spirit of England* itself becomes part of the
sonic archives—a strand of musical engagement with violence that has its place in
listening from the archive—while also displacing the more terrifying, or mundane,
sounds of war itself.

Still thornier questions are raised when music itself becomes complicit within acts of
violence or the representation thereof. Music used directly for the purposes of
propaganda on either side of any conflict might seem straightforward enough, but
appropriating it to instill fear in the enemy has a long history going back to Classical and Biblical times, treating organized sound itself as a weapon. The extension of that use of music into an instrument of torture, as documented by Suzanne Cusick and others, also poses profound ethical questions encompassing to the role of the scholars themselves (psychologists, sociologists, and even musicologists) in actively or passively supporting such practices for a purported greater good.¹⁷ It might also be worth asking how to listen to, and reflect on, the cultural work of musical soundtracks commonly added to representations of war and violence, whether in films—as with Beethoven and Gioachino Rossini in *A Clockwork Orange* (1971), Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in *Apocalypse Now* (1979), or Elgar's "Nimrod" in *Dunkirk* (2017)—or in video games.

These examples can serve only as signposts towards the presence of music, sound, and silence in the archives. There are other documents, for instance those that speak to shell shock, trauma, and the beginnings of music as therapy, developed by women—often nurses—who realized that their musicking might reach soldiers profoundly affected by the relentless noise of battle. There are official documents by governments regulating soldiers' musical practice. There are letters about, and photographs of, music-making in war theaters. There are musicians who write music that hold the noise of battle at bay, and poets who use musical metaphors to describe battle noise they suffered as concerts from hell. The archives are rich with documents that inscribe the sonic experience in war, but they pose significant challenges and dilemmas to musicological interpretation, none more than that of listening across the experiential divide and privileging the voices of the dead over the agendas of the living.

9

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOHLMAN Andrea F, “Overwriting Sound: Polish Commemoration in Concert”, FAUSER Annegret and FIGUEROA Michael A. (eds.), *Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma*, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2020 (in press).

CARTER Tim, “Listening to Music in Early Modern Italy: Some Problems for the Urban Musicologist”, KNIGHTON Tess and MAZUELA-ANGUITA Ascensión (eds.), *Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe*, Turnhout, Brepols, 2018, pp. 25-49.

COWGILL Rachel, “Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7”, *First World War Studies*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2011, pp. 75-107.

CUSICK Suzanne G., “‘You Are in a Place That is Out of the World’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror’”, *Journal of the Society for American Music*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26.

FAUSER Annegret, “Cultural Musicology: New Perspectives on World War II”, *Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History*, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 282-286. See also on-line edition on http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Fauser-2-2011.
FAUSER Annegret, *Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013.

FOSTER Susan Leigh (ed.), *Choreographing History*, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995.

GITELMAN Lisa, *Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2014.

KITTLER Friedrich A, *Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900*, Munich, Fink, 1985 (English translation: *Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900*, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990).

LAUGHLAND Oliver, "'It Makes it Real': Hundreds March to Re-enact 1811 Louisiana Slave Rebellion", *The Guardian*, 11 November 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/11/louisiana-slave-rebellion-reenactment-artist-dread-scott.

MEYER Petra (ed.), *Acoustic Turn*, Munich, Fink, 2008.

NDALIKO Chérie Rivers, "The Accidental Archivist: Memory, Resonance, and Decay in Kivu", FAUSER Annegret and FIGUEROA Michael A. (eds.), *Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma*, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2020 (in press).

OCHOA GAUTIER Ana María, *Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2014.

*Saving Private Ryan* (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, DVD released by Dreamworks Video, 2004.

TAUSIG Benjamin, "Sound and Movement: Vernaculars of Sonic Dissent", *Social Text*, vol. 36, no. 3, 2018, pp. 25-45.

TAYLOR Diana, *The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2003.

## NOTES

1. In the DVD's bonus material, members of the production team describe in striking detail how they worked on turning the sonic representation of battle into an “authentic” experience in the movie theater in order to “transport” audiences in the manner of time travel in the middle of the battle field. *Saving Private Ryan* (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, DVD released by Dreamworks Video, 2004.

2. The reenactment of the 1811 Louisiana slave rebellion on 10 November 2019, included chants and songs, echoing and recreating a “sonic vernacular” as part of the event. See LAUGHLAND Oliver, "'It Makes it Real': Hundreds March to Re-enact 1811 Louisiana Slave Rebellion", *The Guardian*, 11 November 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/11/louisiana-slave-rebellion-reenactment-artist-dread-scott. The term "sonic vernacular" is borrowed from TAUSIG Benjamin, "Sound and Movement: Vernaculars of Sonic Dissent", *Social Text*, vol. 36, no. 3, 2018, pp. 25-45. He defines (p. 26) "sonic vernaculars" as being "composed of locally trenchant sonic and aural practices and the symbolic meanings that they transduce and mediate."

3. I addressed some of this cleavage in FAUSER Annegret, "Cultural Musicology: New Perspectives on World War II", *Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History*, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 282-286. See also on-line edition on http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Fauser-2-2011.
4. Chérie Rivers Ndaliko addresses the absence and reconstitution of archives in “The Accidental Archivist: Memory, Resonance, and Decay in Kivu”, FAUSER Annegret and FIGUEROA Michael A. (eds.), Ann Arbor, *Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma*, University of Michigan Press, 2020 (in press).

5. I am drawing here on scholarship discussing phenomenological gap inherent in danced reenactment. See, for example, FOSTER Susan Leigh, “Manifesto for Dead and Moving Bodies”, formulated in her introduction to FOSTER Susan Leigh (ed.), *Choreographing History*, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 3-21, especially p. 6.

6. Although historians have begun to claim an acoustic turn of their discipline, the lack of interdisciplinary engagement with such fields as musicology make for limited and often naïve evocations of the sonic. See, for example, MEYER Petra (ed.), *Acoustic Turn*, Munich, Fink, 2008.

7. On the concept of “paper” and the function of documents, see GITELMAN Lisa, *Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2014.

8. Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “Aufschreibesystem” still offers a valuable hermeneutic concept to address the material conditions of mediation. Unfortunately the English term “discourse network” misses some of its specificity. See KITTLER Friedrich A, *Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900*, Munich, Fink, 1985 (English translation: *Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900*, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990).

9. TAYLOR Diana, *The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 19-20.

10. OCHOA GAUTIER Ana María, *Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia*, Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 2014, p. 3.

11. Lisa Gitelman’s 1999 formulation is cited in OCHOA GAUTIER, *Aurality*, p. 7. Ochoa Gautier continues: “This involved not only musical notation but also words about sound and aural perception, and recognizing the different historical ways in which technologies of the legible made and still make sound circulation possible. Since the period I address is before the invention of sound reproduction machines, I necessarily work with the inscription of sounds into writing.”

12. FAUSER Annegret, *Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 12-14.

13. William Hammerstein, letter to Oscar Hammerstein II, December 16, 1944, cited in FAUSER, *Sounds of War*, p. 119.

14. See, for example, the construction of music as a sonic space of calm in the relentless soundscape of early modern cities with their relentless bells and noisy streets discussed in CARTER Tim, “Listening to Music in Early Modern Italy: Some Problems for the Urban Musicologist”, KNIGHTON Tess and MAZUELA-ANGUITA Ascensión (eds.), *Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe*, Turnhout, Brepols, 2018, pp. 25-49.

15. Andrea F. Bohlman introduced the concept of “overwriting” into sonic memory regimes in BOHLMAN Andrea F, “Overwriting Sound: Polish Commemoration in Concert”, FAUSER Annegret and FIGUEROA Michael A. (eds.), *Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma*, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2020 (in press).

16. On the emergence of *The Spirit of England* as the emblematic piece for national commemoration by the BBC, see COWGILL Rachel, “Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7”, *First World War Studies*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2011, pp. 75-107.

17. See, for example, CUSICK Suzanne G., “‘You Are in a Place That is Out of the World’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror’”, *Journal of the Society for American Music*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26.
ABSTRACTS

When the sonic remnants of violence and war survive in archives as being inscribed in such media as paper, it can be a challenge to engage with their aurality, all the more because subsequent audiovisual representations might overlay such embodied past experiences with different musical signifiers. Drawing on examples from the two world wars of the twentieth century, this contribution discusses which positionalities an author might embrace when listening to war and violence through the presence of music, sound, and silence in the archives.

Lorsque les vestiges sonores de la violence et de la guerre survivent en étant archivés sur un support comme le papier, il peut être difficile d'accéder à leur dimension aurale. D'autant plus que des représentations audiovisuelles ultérieures peuvent venir recouvrir ces expériences autrefois incarnées en y superposant des signifiants musicaux différents. En s'appuyant sur des exemples issus des deux guerres mondiales du XXᵉ siècle, cet article examine les perspectives que peut adopter un auteur pour se mettre à l'écoute de la guerre et de la violence en prêtant attention à la présence, au sein des archives, de la musique, du son et du silence.

INDEX

**Keywords:** archives, aurality, listening, music, war, violence, musical historiography

**Mots-clés:** archives, auralité, écoute, musique, guerre, violence, historiographie musicale

AUTHOR

ANNEGRET FAUSER

Annegret Fauser is Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on music of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially that of France and the United States. She is the author of *Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair* (2005), *Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II* (2013), *The Politics of Musical Identity* (2015), and *Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring* (2017). In *Transposition*, she discussed cultural transfer in 2013 in a special issue on "Musique et théorie queer".
# Nature's Sonic Order on the Western Front

## *L'ordre sonore de la nature sur le front de l'Ouest*

### Michael Guida

<footnote n="1">¹ The sound of human conflict can only be made sense of in relation to the surrounding reference sounds of the natural world. It is in the extreme conditions of wartime that the context of the natural world takes on renewed sensory power. Here I suggest we pay attention to nature's sounds and their reception to better understand the ways in which men experienced and endured the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War. To survive in that place it was necessary to listen to the surrounding environment for sounds of danger, safety and relief. There was much more to hear than battle noise in the trenches and I argue that under conditions that were barely tolerable the sounds of the natural world needed to be heard and, when they were, they were assigned special meaning. The soldier's writing during and after the war that I examine makes clear that the disorder of trench experience could in part be managed or even reversed when the sounds of nature were brought to auditory attention.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² There is no doubt that technological battle noise was overwhelming to combatants on both sides of the line.¹ However, over time the idea of the monstrous noise of the guns has saturated post-war narratives with its symbolism of a new scale of technological violence and combined with the psychological phenomenon of “shell shock” has become a prism through which much of the cultural history of the 1914-18 has been viewed.² Ford Madox Ford, who served in the Welch Regiment and lost his memory for three weeks when he was concussed by a shell explosion, wrote that the noise “said things of an intolerable intimacy”.³ The noise got inside the body and into mind. Young German recruits exposed to the crash of artillery were left “green and throwing up”, Erich Maria Remarque reported a decade after his combat experience in *All Quiet on the Western Front*.⁴ Memory was deeply impressed by the sound of shelling, Robert Graves telling five decades on of a noise that “never stopped for one moment – ever”.⁵ Nevertheless, scholars must work beyond these kinds of accounts if trench experience and the techniques of emotional survival are to be better understood.</footnote>
3

Like so much war, the Western Front conflict was played out within nature – the field of battle was a trench network cut into hundreds of miles of landscape, recognised by British soldiers at least initially as pastoral and pleasantly evocative of home. Even the decimation of the French and Belgian countryside over the course of the war did not prevent it retaining certain rural potencies in the minds of those who were submerged there. Civilian soldiers from the suburbs or the city found themselves hard pressed to the rawness of the natural world. Combat experience had to be measured to some extent against this immediate natural environment. The deathly expanses of mud and tree stumps familiar from trench photography (which in fact supported a new ecosystem of owls, rats and corpses) were a reality for many in the front line, but soldiers cycled through the tiers of the trench system, resting in reserve trenches or behind the lines. In all of these places men encountered and wrote about the natural world, which seemed to carry on and even thrive.⁶ Men may have lived underground, in the “troglodyte world” of the trenches as Paul Fussell called it,⁷ with feet sucked by a terrible compost, trapped in “one huge grave”,⁸ but there was hope above this mess.

4

Soldiers' letters, diaries, memoirs and poems reveal that amid the chaos of war, and perhaps because of it, nature was heard to sound out. The songs of birds, the murmur of trees and the stillness of the cosmos were rich in meaning to men in peril. To perceive – or to imagine – such sounds within the tyranny of bombardment or the haunted silences that followed was not unusual. Paying attention to the sonic environment was a way to understand the status and safety of ones' surroundings, which could rarely be reliably gauged through vision. In the trench system "hearing became much more important than vision as an index of what was real and threatening", Eric Leed has argued.⁹ The "sonic-mindedness" of German troops that Yaron Jean has described came from auditory training to distinguish between different kinds of overhead ordnance.¹⁰ Airborne projectiles were named by British troops for their sonic character (Coal Boxes, Jack Johnsons, Whizz-Bangs), as the identification of alien sounds was the first part of avoiding danger.¹¹ This kind of acute listening was a technique of survival that gave renewed significance to all sounds. Ford Madox Ford noticed that the texture of the landscape altered the sound of artillery fire and he wrote to his friend Joseph Conrad about it: "In woody country heavy artillery makes the *most* noise, because of the echoes... On dry down land the sound is much *sharper*; it hits *you* & shakes *you*."¹² This was not only literary sensitivity at work; sound-ranging techniques requiring this kind of knowledge were being developed by engineers to locate enemy artillery positions.

5

Finding ways to listen through and beyond the noise was necessary. There were other sounds to be heard, birdsong in particular. Some accounts give the impression that birdsong was pulled from the air despite the noise. Ford told a friend in a letter that amid the noise “the ear picks out the singing of innumerable larks”.¹³ Such small but urgent sounds needed to be heard. The sound of the most ordinary birds like sparrows and starlings offset the “grime of battle”.¹⁴ Of course there were lulls in the firing and into these spaces sounds of significance would find a place. Theodore Wilson wrote to his aunt in April 1916: “I’m writing in a trench not very far from the Germans and I’ve just heard the first cuckoo!”¹⁵ This incongruous report came from the tradition in England of being the first to identify the herald of spring. Wilson had managed to find a sense of homeliness and continuity in the trenches.
6 The silence after a bombardment or at night-time presented an antithesis to the noise that could rarely be savoured. Agitated alertness persisted, ears straining for meaning. In a listening-post poking out into no-man's-land Frederick Harvey found himself afraid to move or whisper "waiting in wonder whether 'twas the breeze moved in the grass, shaking the frozen flowers just then".¹⁶ In the darkness, the screams of wounded men in no-man's-land might be accompanied by the liquid notes of a nightingale. Reflecting on this dreadful juxtaposition, one soldier felt that the nightingale's song was "the only real thing which would remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten".¹⁷ More than any other, the nightingale's song was loaded with meaning and symbolism, but so were many encounters with nature's sounds that were known from home. Remarque's protagonist in *All Quiet on the Western Front* escaped his night-watch duty for a moment in a reverie in which he was back with his boyhood friends beneath a row of poplar trees where the wind sang.¹⁸ These memories felt "quiet" to him even if they were not when first experienced. Remarque called them "soundless apparitions" and they were accompanied by longing and melancholy more than hope. The trees that Edmund Blunden met in the darkness could be sinister broken figures or proud sentinels standing tall. Some provided companionship even if they were not very talkative. He wrote that one "sad guard of trees dripping with the darkness of autumn had nothing to say but sempiternal syllables".¹⁹ Difficult silences could be punctuated by private communication with nature, when speaking out loud was not possible.

7 These responses to an encounter with nature's sounds often suggest a search for order and rhythm in trench life. The sonic extremes of noise and silence were intolerable and demanded alternatives. Birdsong structured the unpredictability of trench-time, when sleep and circadian rhythms were dislocated, most notably my research has shown with the lark heard at day-break and the nightingale at night-time. To engage with these sounds was to find pattern and sense within the incoherence of trench existence. When the artillery officer and poet, Edward Thomas, recorded in his diary the sounds of birds together with his unit's shelling, it was as if the two gave shape and balance to a morning ritual that could continue indefinitely. "Up at 4.30. Blackbirds sing at battery at 5.45 – shooting at 6.30".²⁰ Without the birds, just the shooting would remain and the counter-weight to the pounding of guns would be gone.

8 There is a question about how much could actually be heard amid the cacophonies of shelling (although both the song and the roar may well have been accentuated in soldiers' accounts). If some of the sounds of nature recorded in primary sources were works of fantasy or the imagination, they were clearly needed and meaningful and therefore warrant attention. Though remembered and 'fictional' accounts are accused of perpetuating myths, I have found they are not very different to unpublished diaries kept by combatants during the war.²¹ Like others, I have drawn upon the writing of all ranks but the men who wrote were often of a middle-class literary mind. Were these men particularly sensitive to nature's sounds and its poetry? Perhaps so, but I tend to think that what they felt was common to many who did not have the chance to express themselves in writing. There is also a question of soldiers' writing giving expression to pastoral motifs, beloved of much writing of the period, rather than reality. Paul Fussell's literary analysis *The Great War and Modern Memory* saw "recourse to the pastoral" as an English mode of both "fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them".²² However, I have worked with material that gives precedence to immediate lived experience rather than imaginative
impressions. Indeed, I see soldiers' engagement with nature sounding out as evidence of living urgently in present tense, rather than reaching back for the comfort of tradition. To hear a bird meant you, and it, were alive and might continue to be. The responses to nature in soldiers' writing show a determined effort to make meaning and sense out of a sound world that seemed to deny such a possibility.

9 Soldiers drew towards them sounds that were explicitly *not* about the war because they offered refreshing meanings. Most written about was the vitality and energy of singing birds whose sound was known from home and signified to many patriotic defiance and resilience. The occupation of the air above the trenches by birdsong signified that sonic order and perhaps universal order had been reinstated. Birdsong rose free from the stasis and filth of the trenches and into the sky where it could purify the corrupted atmosphere. The punch of detonations, the cries of the wounded, the hiss of corpses could be cleansed with the notes of bird song, if only momentarily. Birdsong could disrupt the violence of explosion with familiar, chiming musicality. It could counter the excruciating weight of shelling with a lightness and freedom. The lark's overhead cascade turned eyes upwards towards the stillness of the cosmos. This connection to the peace and permanence of the heavens, to nature in its most perfect grandeur, was noticed by the troops on the ground. Robert Sterling in a letter to a friend admitted that he had been "longing for some link with the normal universe detached from the storm". He found in the "sightless song" of a lark "the very essence of the Normal and Unchangeable Universe carrying on unhindered...".²³

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

BLUNDEN Edmund, *Undertones of War*, London, Penguin, 2000 [1928].

BULL Michael, "Into the Sounds of War: Imagination, Media and Experience", GRIMSHAW-AAGAARD Mark, WALTHER-HANSEN Mads and KNAKKERGAARD Martin (eds.), *The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 175-202.

FORD Ford Madox, *No More Parades*, Manchester, Carcanet, 2011 [1925].

FUSSELL Paul, *The Great War and Modern Memory*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013 [1977].

GILLESPIE Alexander, *Letters from Flanders*, London, Smith and Elder, 1916.

GRAVES Robert, "The Great Years of Their Lives", *The Listener*, 15 July 1971, p. 74.

HABECK Mary, "Technology in the First World War: The View From Below", WINTER Jay, PARKER Geoffrey and HABECK Mary (eds.) *The Great War and the Twentieth Century*, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 99-131.

HARVEY Frederick, poem "A True Tale of the Listening Post", NOAKES Vivien (ed.), *Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry*, Stroud, The History Press, 2006, pp. 90-91.

HOUSMAN Lawrence (ed.), *War Letters of Fallen Englishmen*, New York, EP Dutton, 1930.
JEAN Yaron, “The Sonic Mindedness of the Great War: Viewing History through Auditory Lenses”, FEIEREISEN Florence and MERLEY HILL Alexandra (eds.) *Germany In the Loud Twentieth Century*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 51-62.

LAFFIN John (ed.), *Letters from the Front, 1914-18*, London, JM Dent, 1973.

LEED Eric J, *No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979.

LEWIS-STEMPEL John, *Where the Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, the Great War*, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016.

LUDWIG Richard M, *Letters of Ford Madox Ford*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965.

NASH Paul, *Outline. An Autobiography and Other Writings*, London, Faber & Faber, 1948.

REMARQUE Erich Maria, *All Quiet on the Western Front*, London, Vintage, 1996 [1929].

SAUNDERS Max, “Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939): Biography” (http://www.fordmadoxford society.org/fords-biography.html, accessed 20 December 2019).

THOMAS R George (ed.), *Edward Thomas: Collected Poems*, London, Faber & Faber, 2004.

VANDEVELDE Tom, “‘Are you Going to Mind the Noise?’: Mapping the Soundscape of Parade’s End”, CHANTLER Ashley and HAWKES Rob (eds.), *Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity*, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2014.

WINTER Jay, “Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War”, *Journal of Contemporary History*, vol. 35, no. 1, 2000, pp. 7-11.

ZEEPVAT Charlotte (ed.), *Before Action: William Noel Hodgson and the 9th Devons: A Story of the Great War*, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2015.

## NOTES

1. For example, HABECK Mary, “Technology in the First World War: The View From Below”, WINTER Jay, PARKER Geoffrey and HABECK Mary (ed.) *The Great War and the Twentieth Century*, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 103-112.

2. WINTER Jay, “Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War”, *Journal of Contemporary History*, vol. 35, no. 1, 2000, p. 7-11.

3. SAUNDERS Max, “Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939): Biography” (http://www.fordmadoxford society.org/fords-biography.html, accessed 20 December 2019). Quotation in FORD Ford Madox, *No More Parades*, Manchester, Carcanet, 2011 [1925], p. 11.

4. REMARQUE Erich Maria, *All Quiet on the Western Front*, London, Vintage, 1996 [1929], p. 76.

5. GRAVES Robert, “The Great Years of Their Lives”, *The Listener*, 15 July 1971, p. 74.

6. LEWIS-STEMPEL John, *Where the Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, the Great War*, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016.

7. FUSSELL Paul, *The Great War and Modern Memory*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013 [1977], p. 39.

8. NASH Paul, *Outline. An Autobiography and Other Writings*, London, Faber & Faber, 1948, p. 186.

9. LEED Eric J, *No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 124.
10. JEAN Yaron, "The Sonic Mindedness of the Great War: Viewing History through Auditory Lenses", FEIEREISEN Florence and MERLEY HILL Alexandra (eds.) *Germany In the Loud Twentieth Century*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 53-55.

11. WILLIAMS JS, letter, 3 October 1915, *Letters from the Front, 1914-18*, LAFFIN John (ed.), London, JM Dent, 1973, p. 58; BLUNDEN Edmund, *Undertones of War*, London, Penguin, 2000 (1928), pp. 38-39.

12. LUDWIG Richard M, *Letters of Ford Madox Ford*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 73.

13. VANDEVELDE Tom, "'Are you Going to Mind the Noise?' : Mapping the Soundscape of Parade's End", CHANTLER Ashley and HAWKES Rob (eds.), *Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity*, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2014, p. 59.

14. HODGSON William, poem "Back to Rest", quoted in ZEEPVAT Charlotte (ed.), *Before Action: William Noel Hodgson and the 9th Devons: A Story of the Great War*, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2015, p. 130.

15. WILSON Theodore, letter to his aunt, 27 April 1916, HOUSMAN Lawrence (ed.), *War Letters of Fallen Englishmen*, New York, EP Dutton, 1930, p. 296.

16. HARVEY Frederick, poem "A True Tale of the Listening Post", NOAKES Vivien (ed.), *Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry*, Stroud, The History Press, 2006, pp. 90-91.

17. GILLESPIE Alexander, 24 April 1915, *Letters from Flanders*, London, Smith and Elder, 1916, p. 111.

18. REMARQUE, *All Quiet*, p. 86.

19. BLUNDEN, *Undertones of War*, p. 93.

20. THOMAS R George (ed.), *Edward Thomas: Collected Poems*, London, Faber & Faber, 2004, p. 170.

21. See also BULL Michael, "Into the Sounds of War: Imagination, Media and Experience", GRIMSHAW-AAGAARD Mark, WALTHER-HANSEN Mads and KNAKKERGAARD Martin (eds.) *The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 182.

22. FUSSELL, *The Great War*, p. 235.

23. STERLING Robert, letter to a friend, 18 April 1915, HOUSMAN (ed.), *War Letters*, p. 263.

ABSTRACTS

Sound scholars and historians have made much of the noise of warfare. In the trenches of the Western Front, however, there was more to hear than the unprecedented noise of shelling, and the cultivation of listening for danger and for safety brought other sounds to the ear that could offer relief from the intensity of the conflict. Often these were the sounds of nature: birdsong, trees and the stillness of the heavens above the battlefields. Soldiers' writing (letters, diaries, memoirs and poems) reveals a deep engagement with these sounds as part of an effort to make sense of the fearsome environment in which men were contained. Birdsong in particular gave harmony and rhythm to a fractured and unpredictable sound-world. It made coherent, if only for a moment, the possibility of continuity and survival. High above the trenches, it was the cascading song of the lark that cleansed the air and drew eyes further upwards to an imaginative cosmic escape.

Les spécialistes du son et les historien.nes ont beaucoup exploré le bruit de la guerre. Néanmoins, dans les tranchées du front de l'Ouest, il y avait plus à entendre que le bruit inédit des bombardements. Une culture de l'écoute orientée vers le danger et la sécurité n'excluait pas d'autres sons qui pouvaient offrir un soulagement face à l'intensité du conflit. Ces sons
provenaient souvent de la nature : le chant des oiseaux, les arbres et le calme du ciel au-dessus des champs de bataille. Les écrits des soldats (lettres, journaux intimes, mémoires et poèmes) révèlent un intérêt profond pour ces sons en tant qu'ils participaient d'un effort pour donner un sens à l'environnement redoutable au sein duquel les hommes étaient confinés. Le chant des oiseaux, en particulier, donnait de l'harmonie et du rythme à un monde sonore fracturé et imprévisible. Il donnait une cohérence, ne serait-ce que pour un instant, à la possibilité d'une continuité et d'une survie. Au-dessus des tranchées, c'étaient les jaillissements du chant de l'alouette qui purifiaient l'air et élevaient le regard vers une évasion cosmique imaginée.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** Première Guerre mondiale, front de l'Ouest, tranchées, nature, son, écoute, rythme, chant d'oiseaux, bruit, silence

**Keywords:** First World War, Western Front, trenches, nature, sound, listening, rhythm, birdsong, noise, silence

## AUTHOR

### MICHAEL GUIDA

Michael Guida is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the place of nature in ideas of British modernity. He is a research associate and tutor in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, UK, and is completing a book for OUP called *Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio and Modern Life, 1914-45*. His recent publications include a book chapter about Ludwig Koch's birdsong broadcasts during the Second World War in the monograph *Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century* (UCL Press, 2018), and another about birdsong and emotions in *The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History* (2018).
# Sound Bites: Music as Violence

## Morsures sonores : la musique comme violence

### John Morgan O'Connell

## War as Peace

1. “C'est la musique qui parle, pas les paroles”.¹ So observes Jean-Marc Rouillan with reference to the Irish band called the Them (among others). For him, music can simultaneously speak about trivial sentiments while at the same time express visceral emotions. Where a text talks about love a melody might simultaneously scream rage. Here, the voice operates as an instrument of confrontation. Rouillan seems to confirm the paradoxical character of music in violent contexts, music at once being employed to incite war and at the same time being used to promote peace.² Interestingly, Rouillan reminiscences about the musical preferences of his activist colleagues he notes in particular the importance of punk bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols for articulating collectively a dissonant register. For him, music-making reinforced a social bond among comrades and music listening quenched the terrifying heat after an affray. In contrast to other commentators,³ Rouillan confirms that he never listened to music before or during armed confrontations. Rather, music afforded peace after war.

2. For Rouillan, music operated as a resource to enable de-escalation. It is interesting to note the repertoire chosen by Rouillan after action. He includes “classical” composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gabriel Fauré in his selection. This is a very different playlist from the ones chosen by militants in other conflicts. As Lisa Gilman among others note, metal was widely listened to by American soldiers in Iraq before engaging the enemy.⁴ For Rouillan and Gilman different styles of music afforded distinctive pathways in their reaction to and their preparation for violent episodes.⁵ For Rouillan and Gilman respectively a Walkman and an iPod were the auditory weapons of choice. Like other scholars observe with reference to different conflicts,⁶ Rouillan was attracted first to a musical subculture before adopting a radical ideology. Interestingly, Rouillan equates music with politics just as Jonathan Pieslak equates metal with war. Of course, music is not politics and metal is not war. Music is a
metaphor for both. That is, music provides a distinctive conduit for either fulfilling or transcending acts of violence.

3 With these issues in mind, I interrogate in this essay the ideas that concern music and violence which are presented by scholars in this *Transposition* special issue. Although each article is very different, common themes emerge. I interpolate these with reference to my own research into the sounds of music in the Gallipoli Campaign (1915-1916).⁷ Following Nikita Hock,⁸ I examine the notion of metaphor as it relates to underground hideouts in a war zone. Here, a grave is employed in song and poetry to signify a living tomb. Following Victor A. Stoichita,⁹ I look at the sounds that perforate a “sound bubble” on the front line. In this context, I document the informal manifestation of sound and the formal organization of music that appear in the diaries and memoires of combatants. Following Sarah Kay,¹⁰ I examine the ways in which contrafactum helps clarify the ambivalent positionality of Irish recruits in the Gallipoli Campaign. Not ignoring the visualization of violence, I find Kay’s exploration of “extimacy” especially useful when interpreting expressionist representations of a naval assault in the Dardanelles.¹¹

4 In my monograph entitled *Commemorating Gallipoli through Music*,¹² I examine the relationship between music and memory as it relates to a military expedition. In it, I explore the multiple ways in which music is employed to remember or forget, to celebrate and commemorate a victory (on the part of the Central Powers) and a defeat (on the part of the Allied forces) in the Dardanelles during the First World War (1914-1918). In particular, I interrogate the ambivalent position of sound in a warzone, music at once being used to unify allies (by way of motivation) or to scatter foes (by means of terrorization). Further, I show how song can serve to articulate a nationalist defiance and an imperialist consensus among ethnic minorities. Through musical analysis, I demonstrate how the colonized could become the colonizer (in the case of the Irish) and a how minority might conform to a majority (in the case of the Armenians). In short, I argue that commemoration is itself an act of war clothed in the mantle of peace.

## Beyond the Grave

5 In his contribution, Nikita Hock looks at the acoustic ecology of Jewish survivors who were hiding underground to escape their Nazi persecutors in Poland and East Galicia during the Second World War (1939-1945). Based on the testimony to be found in diaries and notebooks, Hock reconstructs the sound world of relevant bunkers and hideouts both in urban and rural contexts. Here, he focuses on the sound strategies employed by Jews to survive, such as the strategic enforcement of silence or the selective engagement with sound. Of particular interest, Hock shows how Jews employed sound to make sense of their entombment, from the sound of the human world above ground to the silence of the inhuman world below. It is noteworthy that Jews used metaphoric language to write about their precarious condition. In particular, they often employed the grave as a metaphor to represent their seclusion from death and their exclusion from life. As such, Jews frequently expressed that they were suspended between life and death in an apparent grave where they were buried alive.

6 The grave is a common topos in the Turkish songs of the Gallipoli Campaign. For example, in the iconic number entitled “Çanakkale Türküsü” (en. “Song of the
understanding the meaning of sound in trench warfare. But, I think Stoichita's conception of affordance is extremely useful for understanding music-making in a warzone. In the Gallipoli Campaign, soldiers in the front trenches interpreted sound in what Gilman calls "a sound bubble",¹⁴ by selectively listening to the enemy "over the parapet". In the Gallipoli Campaign combatants afforded music with different agencies either by endowing music with an aggressive intent during active confrontation or by granting music a reflective ambience during passive disengagement.

10 The sounds of battle on the front line ranged from noise to music. From the petrifying screams of the dying to the thunderous cacophony of artillery, the soundscape of a frontal assault was as terrifying as it was confusing. However, some sounds were predictable: from the sacred chant of the Turks: "God is great!" (tr. "Allahuekber!") to the war cry of the French: "Long live France!" (fr. "Vive la France!"). In certain instances Allied recruits sang popular numbers while charging into battle. There are accounts of Irish soldiers singing "It's a long way to Tipperary" when going "over the top". Of course, bugles and whistles were the preferred instruments of assault on both sides, although the musical formations of bugles and drums were considered by then to be anachronistic.¹⁵ In Scottish regiments, pipers led the attack in notable battles. During Turkish attacks, a brass band played patriotic marches in the forward trenches. A common observation was as follows: "The Turks blew bugles, sounded martial music, shouted 'Allah Allah' and died".¹⁶

11 The music-making in a war zone ranged from the informal to the formal. Soldiers on both sides entertained each other by singing and playing. In such instances, the harmonica was frequently mentioned in English and Turkish sources. On both sides, gramophones played an important part in the soundscape, the sounds of the latest hits wafting across no-man's land. Notably, gramophones were also used as booby traps. Concert parties were organized informally in the front line trenches. These could be surprisingly cosmopolitan affairs featuring Arab and Turkish repertoire on the part of the Central Powers and Māori and "Senegalese" repertoire on the part of the Allied forces. Written recollections of such events were not always complimentary. At a formal level, religious services were convened to boost morale. However, hymn singing in Christian worship sometimes attracted the unwelcome attention of enemy fire. Musical performances were also arranged behind the lines by both sides to foster motivation. One Australian cornet player, Ted McMahon (b.1895), is especially celebrated in the memoires of friend and foe alike.¹⁷

12 As Hock might contend, music perforated the "sound bubble" of the trenches, be it in the form of the music created by enemy socialization or the music emanating from enemy media. However, sound could smash the acoustic ecology of such spaces during bombardments. As Stoichita might assert, music afforded distinctive pathways, one being to activate towards, the other being to disengage from aggression. There are a number of anecdotes to this effect. When the Allied commander of the Gallipoli Campaign, Sir Ian Hamilton (1853-1947), attempted to understand the self-sacrifice of Ottoman soldiers during frontal assaults, he noted the "influence of a military band concealed in a forward position [playing] martial music throughout the action".¹⁸ In Hamilton's view, music afforded soldiers with a pathway to engage in a charge with suicidal courage. When McMahon serenaded at dusk on the front line with his rendition of "Silent Night", he was universally applauded by both sides, gunfire
apparently falling silent during such performances. From McMahon's perspective, music afforded soldiers with a pathway to disengage from the inhumanity of war.¹⁹

Love and War

13 "All is fair in love and war" so goes the saying. That is, the rules of war are applicable to the rules of love. Such is the case in Kay's study of love and war in the songs of Bertran de Born. For Kay, war is erotic and love is violent. For her, knighthood is sexy and courtship is combat. Like Stoichita, Kay is interested in simultaneity, for the former scholar affordance is ambiguously suspended between the objective and the subjective, for the latter scholar song evokes yet distorts the interrelationship between desire and death. There are other examples of similitude such as Hock's concern for the living dead and my interest in war as peace (see above). Kay also examines the significance of contrafactum for reconfiguring meanings and subverting identities. Importantly, she argues that the sounds in song are important for understanding the soundscape of a military camp and the sonic thrill of a military exchange. She relates all of this to the life and death moment of the scream, an "extimacy" of the voice which is at once intimate and external.

14 In the Gallipoli Campaign, there is one song that employs contrafactum and reveals extimacy. It is entitled: "Old Gallipoli's a Wonderful Place". It is one of the few songs from the Gallipoli Campaign that survived in the oral tradition among Irish veterans. Composed anonymously in two stanzas, the song considers, first, the strategic aims of the Gallipoli Campaign (that is, the capture of Constantinople or Istanbul) and, second, the deplorable conditions on the Gallipoli peninsula (especially with respect to food and drink). There is a cynical edge to the piece: soldiers are ordered to capture the elevated outpost called "Achi Baba" (tr. "Alçı Tepe") in expectation of an Ottoman defeat. However, that is what is anticipated and not what is achieved. The song indicates the ground-level recognition of a military stalemate among the Irish recruits "that lasts till Doomsday I think". Resigned to their fate, the soldiers "never grumble, they smile through it all", while thinking with empty stomachs about "where the old Gallipoli sweeps down to the sea".

15 "Old Gallipoli" (c. 1915) is an excellent example of contrafactum. It is sung to the tune of the vaudeville number called "The Mountains of Mourne" (1896). Written by the Anglo-Irish songster, Percy French (1854-1920), "The Mountains of Mourne" concerns a satirical commentary upon English society by an Irish emigrant. Two lines of the two songs are almost identical however the two contexts are very different. "Old Gallipoli" is set during wartime in Turkey while "The Mountains of Mourne" is set during peacetime in England. "The Mountains of Mourne" is composed using a melody taken from a nationalist ballad called "Carrigdhoun" (1845). "Carrigdhoun" tells the story of Irish soldiers forced to flee Ireland for France following the Treaty of Limerick (1691). There is an eschatological register to the piece. The ballad foresees a spring when Ireland is freed from the winter of English oppression. Finally, all three pieces are set to the melody of an orientalist verse called "Bendemeer's Stream" (1817). Written by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), the sonnet is part of an allegorical romance entitled "Lalla Rookh".

16 "Old Gallipoli" reveals multiple registers of Irish identity through contrafactum. By using the same melodic frame, "Old Gallipoli" references the social subversion of an
Irish emigrant (in “The Mountains of Mourne”) and the political sedition of an Irish
rebel (in “Carrigdhoun”). It talks about the realities of war (in “Old Gallipoli”) and the
fantasies of love (in “Bendemeer’s Stream”). It speaks about Irish soldiers who are
forced to flee home (in “Carrigdhoun”) and about Irish volunteers who are required to
invade abroad (in “Old Gallipoli”). In many respects, “Old Gallipoli” is a fitting song for
Irish soldiers to sing on a Turkish campaign as it juxtaposes the local with the global
and it melds the “occident” with the “orient”. It shows through parody how the Irish
could simultaneously be colonized (in Ireland) and colonizers (in Turkey). As an
example of extimacy, “Old Gallipoli” renders the unfamiliar familiar in that it compares
favorably through intertextuality a hostile landscape in Turkey with a beloved vista in
Ireland, “where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea”.

Sound the Silence

“Old Gallipoli” represents another level of extimacy. My father sang the song. He must have learned it from his father, a veteran of the Gallipoli Campaign. Wounded and gassed in the conflict, my grandfather never spoke of his wartime experiences. Like many of his contemporaries, he remained silent throughout his life about the terrors of war. Only “Old Gallipoli” testifies to the sound of his silence, an intimate moment made external across the generations through the voice of my father. Here, singing renders the past real in the present. And, my grandfather’s version of “Old Gallipoli” was distinctive in underlying the authenticity of its transmission. Interestingly, song was often employed as a metaphor for the sound of battle in the Gallipoli Campaign. As I show elsewhere, song was often used to describe salvos and barrages.²⁰ Song was employed euphemistically in poems and memoires alike to make sense of the terrifying sounds of trench warfare. That is, song allowed for the intimate control of an exterior sound world that could not be contained.

“Old Gallipoli” speaks to an archive of family memory. As Rouillan might assert, it is the tune rather than the text that speaks in this regard. “Old Gallipoli” embodies within itself multiple levels of family identity that range from militarism abroad (during the eighteenth century) to constitutionalism at home (during the nineteenth century). It speaks to a family engagement with the Ottoman Empire (as officials in peacetime) to a family detachment from the Ottoman Empire (as soldiers in wartime). That my grandfather, as an Irish catholic and a British officer, was involved in the Gallipoli Campaign is especially ironic since he believed he was fighting for peace at home (in the form of Irish independence) while participating in a war away from home (in the service of British imperialism). For some, he was a hero and for others he was a traitor. “Old Gallipoli” provides an insight into this conundrum as it revels through music the complex positionality of an Irishman who was both conquered and conquerer. In this way, “Old Gallipoli” helps remember a past that is almost forgotten.

That being said, “Old Gallipoli” does not convey the life and death extimacy of “The Scream” (1897) by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). As Kay argues, song can re-sound the silence of art. There is one such image of the Gallipoli Campaign, called “Battle in front of the Dardanelles” (gr. “Kampf vor den Dardanellen”) (1915). It was penned by the expressionist artist, Ulrich Hüber (1872-1932), in Berlin for the wartime magazine *Kriegzeit*. It portrays the appalling mayhem of a maritime engagement in the Dardanelles when the Allied navy was repulsed by Turkish gunfire. The lithograph is
framed by a short verse. It is a German version of *Don Juan* “Canto VIII” (1823) by George Lord Byron (1788-1824). Only verse seven is represented here. The poem alludes to the inferno portrayed. It speaks of: “Air, earth and water are allayed by a fiery rain” (gr. “Luft, Erde, Wasser bannt ein Glutenregen”) and of a: “Shore that spits ore, piece by piece, like Vesuvius” (gr. “Das Ufer speit, vesuvgleich Stück auf Stück Erz”) in a Dantesque apparition of the apocalypse.

20

The poem matches the anxious emotionalism of the expressionist movement. It brings to life the oral and the aural experience of violence. Although not (exactly) music, the “Canto” affords the reader with a distinctive pathway towards aggression (after Stoichita). It presents a volcano as a metaphor for naval belligerence (after Hock). It envisions art as a sound vision of life and death, an extimacy worthy of “The Scream” (after Kay). In this respect, it sounds the silence of the artist’s canvas. Although, the “Canto” cannot be considered properly to be contrafactum, it does represent a double reworking of the Byronic original, first by way of translation and second by way of adaptation, the verse now contributing to the propaganda machine of the German Reich. What is missing here is the Byronic flair for parody and satire, that most English quality which loves to laugh at death as the poem “The Diggers” and the song “Old Gallipoli” attest. However, the “Canto” reminds us of the simultaneity of sound and sense: the light flippancy of the word but the intense sincerity of the music (after Rouillan).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CARLYON Les A, *Gallipoli*, London, Bantam Books, 2001.

FUSSELL Paul, *The Great War and Modern Memory*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013 [1975].

GILMAN Lisa, *My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2016.

HAMILTON John, *The Price of Valour: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero*, Hugo Throssell, VC. Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2012.

HOCK Nikita, “Making Home, Making Sense: Aural Experiences of Warsaw and East Galician Jews in Subterranean Shelters during the Holocaust”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4205.

HOLDEN Robert, *And the Band Played On*, Melbourne, Hardy Grant Books, 2014.

KAY Sarah, “Songs of War: The Voice of Bertran de Born”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3785.

KINLOCH Terry, *Echoes of Gallipoli*, Auckland, Exisle Publishing, 2005.

LATHAM Chris., “Re-Sounding Gallipoli: Music for the Campaign”, Concert Brochure, High Court of Australia, Canberra (12 April 2015), unpublished.
O'CONNELL John M., “Free Radical: Music, Violence and Radicalism”, *Journal of Popular Music Studies*, (forthcoming).

O'CONNELL John M., *Commemorating Gallipoli through Music: Remembering and Forgetting*, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017.

O'CONNELL John M., “Music in War, Music for Peace: A Review Essay”, *Ethnomusicology*, vol. 55, no. 1, 2011, pp. 112-127.

O'CONNELL John M. and CASTELO-BRANCO Salwa (eds.), *Music and Conflict*, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2010.

PIESLAK Jonathan, *Radicalism and Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa'ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2015.

PIESLAK Jonathan, *Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War*, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009.

STOICHITA Victor A., “Affordance to Kill: Sound Agency and Auditory Experiences of a Norwegian Terrorist and American Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4065.

TEITELBAUM Benjamin R., *Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017.

VELASCO-PUFLEAU Luis, “Music and Sound in the Armed Struggle of Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3780.

## NOTES

1. VELASCO-PUFLEAU Luis, “Music and Sound in the Armed Struggle of Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3780.

2. See O'CONNELL John M. and CASTELO-BRANCO Salwa (eds.), *Music and Conflict*, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2010.

3. See, for example, PIESLAK Jonathan, *Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War*, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009.

4. See GILMAN Lisa, *My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2016.

5. See STOICHITA Victor A., “Affordance to Kill: Sound Agency and Auditory Experiences of a Norwegian Terrorist and American Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4065.

6. PIESLAK Jonathan, *Radicalism and Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa'ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants*, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2015; TEITELBAUM Benjamin R., *Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017.

7. The Gallipoli Campaign is known by a number of names in different sources. In French it is equally referred to as “la bataille des Dardanelles” and “la bataille de Gallipoli”. In German it is usually known as “die Schlacht von Gallipoli”. In Turkish it is commonly called either “Çanakkale Savaşı” or “Çanakkale Muharebeleri”. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the Allied landings
(1915) on the Gallipoli peninsula as the “Gallipoli Campaign” although I am aware that other names were used in English.

8. HOCK Nikita, “Making Home, Making Sense: Aural Experiences of Warsaw and East Galician Jews in Subterranean Shelters during the Holocaust”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4205.

9. STOICHITA Victor A., “Affordance to Kill: Sound Agency and Auditory Experiences of a Norwegian Terrorist and American Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

10. KAY Sarah, “Songs of War: The Voice of Bertran de Born”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3785.

11. The examples referenced in this essay are taken from my recent monograph (see O'CONNELL, 2017). However, they are reworked to suit the issues in question and the authors' contributions to this special issue. In addition to my edited collection on music and conflict (see O'CONNELL and CASTELO-BRANCO, eds., 2010), the essay also draws upon my work on music and war (see O'Connell, 2011) and music and radicalism (see O'CONNELL, forthcoming). Because of copyright limitations, I am unable to reproduce relevant plates and examples which are featured in my book entitled *Commemorating Gallipoli*.

12. O'CONNELL John M., *Commemorating Gallipoli through Music: Remembering and Forgetting*, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017.

13. See FUSSELL Paul, *The Great War and Modern Memory*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013 [1975].

14. GILMAN, *My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan*, p. 4.

15. CARLYON Les A, *Gallipoli*, London, Bantam Books, 2001, p. 311.

16. HAMILTON John, *The Price of Valour: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC*. Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2012, p. 67.

17. HOLDEN Robert, *And the Band Played On*, Melbourne, Hardy Grant Books, 2014, p. 102.

18. Hamilton cited in KINLOCH Terry, *Echoes of Gallipoli*, Auckland, Exisle Publishing, 2005, p. 136.

19. LATHAM Chris., “Re-Sounding Gallipoli: Music for the Campaign”, Concert Brochure, High Court of Australia, Canberra (12 April 2015), unpublished.

20. O'CONNELL John M., *Commemorating Gallipoli through Music: Remembering and Forgetting*, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 173-174.

ABSTRACTS

In this essay, I interrogate the ideas that concern music and violence which are presented by scholars in this *Transposition* special issue. Although each article is very different, common themes emerge. I interpolate these with reference to my own research into the sounds of music in the Gallipoli Campaign (1915-1916). Following Nikita Hock, I examine the notion of metaphor as it relates to underground hideouts in a war zone. Following Victor A. Stoichita, I look at how music affords distinctive pathways in the fulfilment of or disengagement from acts of violence. Following Sarah Kay, I examine the ways in which contrafactum helps clarify the ambivalent positionality of Allied recruits in a foreign campaign. I also refer to Kay's notion of “extimacy” when interpreting expressionist representations of warfare in the Dardanelles.
Dans cet essai, je discute les idées concernant la musique et la violence présentées par les contribu·eurs·rices de ce numéro hors-série de *Transposition*. Bien que les articles soient très différents les uns des autres, des thèmes communs émergent. Je les croise avec ma propre recherche sur les sons musicaux de la campagne de Gallipoli (1915-1916). En suivant Nikita Hock, j'examine la notion de métaphore en ce qui concerne les cachettes souterraines en zone de guerre. En suivant Victor A. Stoichita, je regarde comment la musique offre différents chemins dans l'accomplissement ou le désengagement d'actes de violence. En suivant Sarah Kay, j'examine les façons dont le contrafactum aide à clarifier la positionnalité ambivalente des recrues alliées dans le cadre d'une campagne étrangère. Je me réfère également à la notion d'« extimité » proposée par Sarah Kay au moment d'interpréter les représentations expressionnistes de la guerre dans les Dardanelles.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** affordance, extimité, contrafactum, métaphore, perforation, simultanéité, Bataille de Gallipoli

**Keywords:** affordance, extimacy, contrafactum, metaphor, perforation, simultaneity, Gallipoli

**Campaign**

## AUTHOR

### JOHN MORGAN O'CONNELL

John Morgan O'Connell is an Irish ethnomusicologist with a specialist interest in cultural history. Currently a Professor of Music at Cardiff University, he has conducted research on music in the Middle East especially with reference to the issues of conflict and commemoration. He is currently working on a project the concerns music in the late-Ottoman Empire (1908-1922) by focusing on Arab music in Turkey and Turkish music in Egypt.
# On Music, Torture and Detention: Reflections on Issues of Research and Discipline

*Musique, torture et détention : réflexions sur des enjeux de recherche et de discipline*

Anna Papaeti

## AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to the guest editor of this issue Luis Velasco-Pufleau and to Martin Daughtry for their valuable commentary, as well as to Athena Athanasiou for many thought-provoking discussions over the last two years. This essay is based on research conducted in the context of a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (acronym MUSDEWAR 706016) held at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, Athens (2017–2019).

1

Musicology and ethnomusicology have been historically and ideologically founded on the notion of music as an inherently positive, benign and ennobling artform. As such, these fields took long to engage with music's long-standing association with violence, war and power, dating back to the Middle Ages if not earlier;¹ the study of Nazi concentration and extermination camps is a notable exception, although it was also examined relatively belatedly.² Left unexplored by historians, social anthropologists, human rights scholars, and legal experts working in the field of violence, detention and justice, this gap began to be critically addressed in music research only in the last decades. In this essay, I explore (ethno)musicology's latent reaction to music's relationship with violence and technologies of terror as a disciplinary trauma, critically discussing a wide range of effects stemming from this silencing. Also investigated are the cultural biases that have turned music into an elusive means of torture, the practice of music torture, its impact and the legal context that has made it possible.
Addressing the intersections of music and terror, I underline the need for more nuanced soundscapes of detention that explore the entanglement of negative and positive uses of music imposed from above and reclaimed from below.

Music, Violence and Torture: A Disciplinary Blind Spot

2 Although movements in the USA and the UK such as new musicology and critical musicology stretched the boundaries of the discipline during the last decades of the twentieth century, enriching it with new areas of study and theoretical approaches, research on music's association with violence remained at the fringes of both musicology and the more progressive discipline of ethnomusicology. Commenting on this latent response, Timothy Rice has noted how ethnomusicology, up until the late twentieth century, focused on the positive role of music for the individual, communities and local societies, contrary to anthropological research which, quite early on, examined issues of violence, methods and mechanisms of repression by authoritarian regimes.³ Musicology followed suit with some delay.

3 Catalyst to this turn were testimonies of detainees from the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, bringing to the fore the institutionalized use of music and sound in torture in the so-called War on Terror. Opening Pandora's box, these accounts initiated changes institutionally, as well as in music research in the USA and Europe. Gradually challenging rigid understandings of the discipline of musicology itself, these changes called for a re-examination of its boundaries, methodologies and ideologies.⁴ Signs of this turn initially took the form of resolutions passed by music societies in the USA, condemning the use of music torture by the USA: resolutions were issued in 2007 by the Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM)⁵ and the Society for American Music (SAM),⁶ and in 2008 by the American Musicological Society (AMS).⁷ On the other side of the Atlantic, there was notable silence from respective music associations in the UK, even though this was a country also involved in the “War on Terror”, implicated in extraordinary renditions, torture and inhuman treatment of detainees. Prompted on separate occasions by researcher Katia Chornik in 2017 to consider the possibility of making public statements about political incidents, both the Royal Music Association (RMA) and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) declined to follow in the footsteps of their US counterparts; the RMA noted that it would take a public role if and when political actions would impact its members or music research.⁸

4 The pioneering work of Suzanne Cusick on music torture in the so-called War on Terror was crucial for the above-mentioned institutional opening. Published at the very moment when debates on torture had re-emerged in civil society, Cusick's articles gave important and much needed theoretical and musicological insights into the use and institutionalization of music in technologies of terror.⁹ A leading and respected musicologist in the USA and internationally, her work also legitimized musicological research on this topic. The issue of legitimation is not one to be taken lightly. Up until recently, research on music, torture and violence was met by musicologists with scepticism, if not hostility, at least in Europe. In the past I personally encountered more than once the comment “this is great research but not musicology” at the end of conference presentations of my research on music torture by the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974), the first documented example of a European country to sample
coercive interrogation techniques later used by South American dictatorships¹⁰ and more recently in the detention centres of the “War on Terror”. Yet even in the USA, Cusick’s research was not embraced by all. It was occasionally met with awkwardness expressed in a favouring of her work on musical culture in early modern Italy. That she was elected president of the AMS (2018–2020) is telling of the changes taking place in musicology in the USA in the last decades.

Music's integral role in torture, thus, emerges as a kind of personal and collective trauma that needed to be supressed.¹¹ The complicity of music, jewel of enlightened civilization, in the breaking of bodies, spirits and subjects turned, for some, into an open wound, a rupture in the “harmonious universe” upon which we, musicologists and ethnomusicologists, had structured our lives and subjectivities. Just like Amfortas's wound in Wagner's *Parsifal*, this open wound that will not heal has been inflicted by a newly acquired knowledge: music's institutionalization in technologies of terror. For some, this knowledge became a point of no return. Cusick explains how her research on music torture initiated a wound concerning her relationship with music; cultivated all her life, this relationship had been central to her subjectivity.¹² The realization that music has always been the medium of violence does not only affect us personally, she notes, but it is also “disciplinarily devastating”. It falls to us, musicologists and ethnomusicologists involved in the study, performance, and reception of music, to document, fully grasp and theorize this phenomenon and its genealogy. Such research and historical recovery are not only of essence in terms of the discipline, but also a matter of urgency given political and legal issues related to current practices of terror.

Nowadays scepticism for these topics mostly belongs to the past, reflecting the broadening of the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology, as well as the important contribution of sound studies¹³ in music research. Notable is a comparison between two international conferences I co-organized in 2013 (Germany) and 2019 (Greece), for which there was an international call for papers.¹⁴ The first, *Music in Detention*, took place in 2013 at the University of Goettingen. It attracted 40 submissions, one third of which dealt with Nazi concentration and extermination camps during WWII. Titled *Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Violence, Therapy*, the second conference took place in 2019 in Athens. There were 80 submissions, double the number, and a notable wide range of new topics; only three papers dealt with Nazi WWII camps. Fourteen years since Cusick’s first article on music torture, we are no longer faced with comments questioning the place of these topics in musicology. There is a move away from the notion of music as a singularly benign artform, which had previously shaped the trajectory of music research, towards a flourishing new emerging field. Its theoretical and thematic branching out, sophistication and critical approaches are reflected in the contributions within this volume.

## Music Torture and the Politics of Opacity

The late(nt) engagement of music research with the intersections of music and violence, and its perpetuation of biases about music's ennobling character make it politically complicit in supporting a critical blindness about music's instrumentalization as an ideal weapon of terror. Music's elusive nature has also been reinforced by the fact that it leaves no visible marks on the body. Its opacity makes it hard to prosecute in courts of law, but also to be fully grasped by the general public or
even human rights lawyers, a point I will return to in the next section. Consequently, these practices have mostly remained undocumented and under-researched, as has music's long-standing association with power, punishment and violence. Grounded epistemologically on ancient Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment, and music's alignment with the transcendental, these perceptions conditioned public understanding about its inherently benign nature.¹⁵ They are strongly evident in the difficulty of registering music as torture in the public sphere as well as popular culture. Comments to the online article *The Torture Playlist* by the website Mother Jones about music torture in the "War on Terror" are indicative.¹⁶ What is striking to notice is the humorous tone of the unfolding discussion below the article. The discussion makes clear the sheer difficulty in grasping the transformation of music per se into a weapon of torture. Music's torturous quality is attributed to the genre, singer or composer rather than the practice itself, implicitly suggesting that listening to good music would create an altogether different experience.

8

Such positions are not limited to the uninformed online reader but are often encountered in popular culture. Woody Allen's *Bananas* (1971) is only one example in a string of many, humorously approaching music torture through this angle. The film's interrogation scene shows a guerrilla caught by the dictatorial regime of San Marcos. Chained on a chair, his torture solely consists of being forced to listen to the operetta *Naughty Marietta*. An ironic comment on opera lovers' aversion to operetta, the scene brings laughter even to the most informed audience. A similar scene in Billy Wilder's comedy *One, Two, Three* (1961) set in West Berlin before the building of the Berlin wall, features the song *Itsy, bitsy, teeny, weeny, yellow polka dot bikini* as the sole form of torture, ultimately driving the victim to a false confession. Both works humorously portray the use of music in coercive interrogation techniques. This kind of representations would be rare—if at all possible—in cinematic portrayals of physical torture like foot whipping, denailing, electroshocks or hair-pulling. What is also interesting to observe is that both comedies were released in the early 1960s and '70s, at precisely the time when these practices were emerging, indicating that these methods were not as oblique as one would expect.

9

Biases about music's inherently benign nature have made it difficult not only for the general public but also for survivors and perpetrators to recognize music's complicity in torture. This is notable in testimonies I collected from political prisoners of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974), who were tortured with music. Even though they testified to its terrorizing effect, they initially did not view music as an integral part to the torture ritual;¹⁷ the latter consisted of a combination of interrogation techniques such as isolation, continuous standing, stress positions, sleep, food and drink deprivation and exposure to continuous music. Instead, the first assumption was that music was played from the radio in order to drown out the cries of torture. However, the Special Interrogation Unit of Greek Military Police (EAT/ESA), where they were held, did not have any civilian buildings directly adjacent to it, but was surrounded by a park, military offices and naval and military hospitals. Additionally, the cries of torture were purposefully used as a means of torture for other detainees, a method also acknowledged by Amnesty International at the time.¹⁸ Gradually over the course of the interview process, they came to realize that the same songs were played in a loop. This realization was prompted by my questions about radio programming, sequence of songs, news programmes and radio broadcasters. On
the one hand, their difficulty speaks volumes about the elusive nature of music's role in
torture. On the other, it also testifies to the fact that they did not want to "cede" music
to their torturers, music being central to their discourse of resistance. Nor did they
wish to credit them with the most cutting-edge torture practices of the period; there is
a post-dictatorship tendency to look down on the dictators as ridiculous and kitschy
individuals, a portrayal that overshadows the absolute terror in which they ruled.

10 The difficulty in acknowledging music's weaponization in torture is also underlined in the testimony of former Guantanamo guard Chris Arendt for the documentary *Songs of War: Music as Torture*.¹⁹ As Arendt explains, he initially understood torture as inflicting acute physical pain—for instance, pulling out nails and administering electroshocks. He only later began to recognize as torture the use of blasting music in combination with stress positions, isolation, and changes between hot and cold, darkness and light. Similar cultural perceptions of what constitutes torture were echoed by a soldier of the Greek Military Police, who acted as a guard at the Special Interrogation Unit (EAT/ESA; 1972–73). He characteristically told me that they did not use scientific torture and electric wires there, but mainly their fists and legs, isolation, and forced standing, among others.²⁰ Contrary to Arendt, he continues to remain oblivious to the fact that these were the most cutting-edge torture methods circulating internationally at the time.

## Coercive Interrogation and Definitions of Torture

11 The qualitative transformation of music into a sonic weapon of torture and interrogation must be understood in the context of the human rights treaties responding to the unprecedented atrocities of World War II, the rise of international human rights law, as well as the intensification of psychological warfare during the unfolding Cold War. The preoccupation with “Soviet brainwashing” in the West, reinforced by debriefings of US soldiers returning from the Korean War, prompted the CIA’s infamous mind control programme (MK Ultra) in the 1950s which included psychological research in universities in Canada, USA and the UK.²¹ This research constituted the basis of new interrogation techniques, aiming to effectively manipulate and collapse subjectivities of opponents in ways that could not be traced or prosecuted. The elusiveness of these techniques, and of music in particular, is therefore intentional and deeply rooted in their design and conception. Heavily relying on culturally shaped perceptions of what constitutes severe pain and suffering, and therefore torture, these methods are essentially based on manipulating captive environments. Important to note here is that they work in an accumulative manner and in combination rather than each one individually.

12 A close look at the CIA *Kubark Counter Intelligence Interrogation Manual*, the first manual to build on this research, shows how this new approach essentially relies on exposure to isolation, silence, continuous sound, stress positions, disorientation through sound, time deprivation and humiliations, causing a state of anxiety, fear, vulnerability and panic.²² As Kubark makes clear, continuous exposure to them can be more effective than the actual sensation of pain: “Control of an interogatee can rarely be established without control of his environment. [...] The threat to inflict pain triggers fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain”.²³ Kubark’s claims have since been corroborated by research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental health
condition related to the experience or witnessing of acute trauma that can leave long-
lasting side-effects. Highlighting how the continued experience of fear and loss of
control create a sense of “learned helplessness”, it has showed that such conditions can
be more detrimental than the experience of physical pain.²⁴ These techniques aim at
creating a cloud, an enclosed space that separates the detainee from his/her
surroundings both physically and mentally. The only person left to relate to or depend
on for support is the interrogator. Music and sound, in this context, constitute a
holistic attack on the bodies and minds of detainees. Creating a sonic enclosure and
obliterating any sense of external or inner space, they totalize the sense of isolation
and disconnection. Detainees are unable to think, meditate or pray, but experience
acute vulnerability and utter loss of control. In his testimony, Ruhal Ahmed, a former
Guantanamo detainee, notes that the introduction of music to the torture ritual made
the situation even worse,²⁵ raising the stakes much higher. Music threatened his sanity,
a position echoed by several others.²⁶

13

Even though coercive interrogation techniques are usually legally deemed as cruel, inhuman and degrading (CID) treatment, they have more long-term effects than so-called physical torture with regard to PTSD.²⁷ In this sense, it is not only the public, survivors and perpetrators who find it hard to fully grasp the impact of this kind of torture, but human rights lawyers as well. And it is precisely at this legal juncture that one has to understand the qualitative change in technologies of terror, including the transformation of music into a sonic weapon of torture. Their success in evading international law is evident in the emphasis placed on severity of pain in legal judgements concerning such interrogation techniques, debates that have recently re-emerged in the context of the Guantanamo tribunal for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of planning the 9/11 attacks. According to news reports, James Mitchell, one of the psychologists to devise so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on Mohammed, acknowledged that such methods induced “learned helplessness”, arguing however that this later goes away.²⁸ In a book detailing these techniques, he and his colleague Bill Harlow argue that even though these methods (including waterboarding) cause fear and panic, they do not constitute torture because they do not inflict severe pain.²⁹

14

PTSD research contests such arguments, underlining how these techniques are linked
to survivors' long-term psychological and physical conditions. Also important in
proving long-term and irreparable damage caused by exposure to loud noise is the 2018
case of the viola player Christopher Goldscheider against the Royal Opera House in the
UK High Court; the trial examined the ways in which exposure to acute noise during
rehearsals of Wagner's *Der Ring des Nibelungen* caused irreparable damage to his
hearing. This was the first time acoustic shock (with symptoms including tinnitus,
hyperacusis and dizziness) was legally recognized as a condition which would require
compensation.³⁰ That Goldscheider has been unable to be around noise since then,
experiencing pain, nausea and dizziness, underlines the long-term side effects of
acoustic shock. It provides an important precedent that can be used in cases of music
torture. It is precisely in these legal debates that (ethno)musicologists and sound
experts can contribute through scientific studies that make this complex phenomenon
and its damaging potential better understood. Collecting and analysing oral histories
can address the dynamic of these methods, as well as short- and long-term effects for
survivors. Additionally, theoretical insights into the use and impact of music and sound
in such contexts can make clear the damaging potential they harbour. That human
rights lawyers defending detainees have turned to musicologists' testimony in substantiating allegations of music torture underlines the need for and importance of research on this topic, both legally and politically.

15 The official argument defending the use of coercive interrogation techniques (misleadingly called “enhanced interrogation” techniques) in the “War on Terror” was based on the 1978 judgement of the European Court of Human Rights for the case of Ireland versus the UK.³¹ The trial examined charges including teaching the Royal Ulster Constabulary and authorizing five interrogation techniques against 14 IRA prisoners: hooding, wall standing, exposure to noise, reduced diet and sleep deprivation. Contrary to the report of the now defunct European Commission of Human Rights, which unanimously deemed these techniques to be torture, the court adopted a restricted meaning. It ruled that these methods amounted “only” to inhuman and degrading treatment. The judgement was not a unanimous one. Judge Dimitrios Evrigenis criticized a definition of torture based on grading the suffering inflicted, stressing the need to account for new forms of technologically sophisticated torture like this one. His remarks sadly continue to have a strong resonance today:

> Torture can be practised—and indeed is practised—by using subtle techniques developed in multidisciplinary laboratories, which claim to be scientific. By means of new forms of suffering that have little in common with the physical pain caused by conventional torture it aims to bring about, even if only temporarily, the disintegration of an individual's personality, the shattering of his mental and psychological equilibrium and the crushing of his will. I should very much regret it if the definition of torture which emerges from the judgment could not cover these various forms of technologically sophisticated torture. Such an interpretation would overlook the current situation and the historical prospects in which the European Convention on Human Rights should be implemented.³²

16 Since 1978, this grading of pain and suffering has prevailed even though both torture and CID treatment are equally banned by article 3 of the European Charter of Human Rights. Such differentiation has since been starkly challenged by research on coercive interrogation techniques and PTSD. And yet the European Court of Human Rights recently missed a historic opportunity to revise the 1978 judgment by rejecting a request submitted by Ireland in 2014. This was based on a folder of declassified files withheld by the UK government during the trial. The files included medical reports, outlining that detainees suffered from a number of psychiatric and psychosomatic symptoms related to the five-point technique; these ranged from severe to medium and mild depending on the age, medical predisposition and experience, among others. They also highlighted that the five-point interrogation techniques were used under ministerial order. What transpires from these files is that the UK had prior knowledge of the severe and long-term effects of these methods, portrayed in court at the time as minor and short-term.³³ The Court's rejection mostly on technical grounds was a missed opportunity to set straight the legal shortfalls concerning a scientific method that by design aimed to cause maximum harm while evading international law. It also failed to recognize its responsibility in providing a judgement that in later years legitimated the extensive use of these methods in the “War on Terror”. As Judge Siofra O'Leary noted in her dissenting opinion in 2018, an intra-state application “is not an exercise of a right of action to enforce the applicant state's rights, but an action against an alleged violation of the public order of Europe”, calling for issues of public interest also to be taken into account along with legal certainty.³⁴
Mechanism of Music Terror

17 The debate around music torture eventually centres around the question of whether its damaging potential is due to the genre or quality of performance mentioned above, or to the materiality of sound. On the one hand, there are those who suggest that a good performance of a favourite piece would not have the same effect as a genre despised by the listener or poorly performed. On the other, there are those who support that the incessant repetition of music turns it, at some point, into sound, which is true. However, music's dynamic also resides in the cultural meanings it carries with regard to class, nationality, ethnicity, religion and gender, among others. These layers of meaning also contribute to the humiliation, stress, fear and sense of vulnerability of the one forced to listen. Cusick has critically discussed the link between music torture, gender coercion and futility in the "War on Terror".³⁵ Former detainees but also CIA operatives have spoken about the effect that certain songs—lyrics, genre, gender of singer—had on detainees, particularly those who were not raised or had not lived in Western countries.³⁶ Furthermore, Katia Chornik has shown that in Pinochet's detention centres in Chile officers played classical music, contrary to guards and agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) who opted for popular music.³⁷ This choice, which denotes class, was immortalized in Ariel Dorfmann's book *Death and the Maiden* (1990) and its cinematic rendition by Roman Polanski (1994). In my work, torture survivors of the military dictatorship in Greece repeatedly spoke about the deeply ironic and offensive nature of the songs played to them. They did not consider their choice accidental. All of them would avoid listening to these songs fifty years later. One said that he would turn off the radio, noting however that such songs are not played any more. Another survivor explained that listening to them now would make him melancholic; he was quick to add that he is generally melancholic.

18 Can listening to a favourite song in the context of detention, interrogation and torture lead to a different experience than sheer terror, fear and helplessness? My interviewee Maria, a former political prisoner of the military dictatorship in Greece, was clear in refuting this. Arrested in 1967, she was held for one year at the prison camps at the barren island of Giaros. There, she was not tortured but lived in inhuman conditions and was forced to listen to nationalist speeches and music, mostly folk songs and marches; this was the last remnant of the "re-education" or "rehabilitation" practices for communists and leftists practiced during the civil-war period in Greece (1946–49).³⁸ In essence, they aimed to create a sonic enclosure that complemented their imprisonment on a barren, uninhabitable island in the midst of the Aegean Sea. Reinforced by the sound of incessant winds, this sonic enclosure was inescapable. A regular song played to them was *Famous Macedonia Country of Alexander*, a folk song she loved. Coming from the geographical region of Macedonia in Northern Greece, she considered it her own and used to dance it. But when this song was identified with the dictators and her oppressors, she could no longer stand listening to it. Each time it was played, she would place her fingers in her ears in an attempt to block the sound, and would feel physically sick.

19 Maria's nausea brings to mind Stanley Kubrick's *Clockwork Orange* based on the book by Anthony Burgess. Just like Maria, the main character Alex wants to vomit each time he listens to music by his favourite composer Ludwig van Beethoven—the result of an experimental “rehabilitation” programme aiming to pacify his violent nature. Chained
on a chair with his eyes pinned-open by government scientists, in a scene that brings to mind images of torture, Alex is forced to watch scenes of sex and violence to the accompaniment of Beethoven's music. It is worth noting here that Burgess's book was published in 1962, a year before the Kubark manual, with which it bears similarities at parts. Indeed, the book portrays the dystopian quality of psychological experiments of the mind-control programme, showing how the ideas behind and the mechanisms of so-called brainwashing were circulating in popular culture and in the public sphere at the time.³⁹

Witnessing Music in Detention: Future Research Perspectives

20

The long-term disciplinary overshadowing of music's dark side also shaped the emerging fields that took it on board. In doing so, the latter overcompensated to some extent by focusing on the negative role of music/sound in order to thoroughly document it and make a strong case, given the initial scepticism as well as the difficulty in acknowledging music's integral role in torture. This focus is also due to the long process of systematic and persistent "digging" in terms of archival and qualitative research, brushing against the grain, in order to uncover such uses, particularly for historical cases. This was, at least, my experience in investigating the previously unknown use of music in coercive interrogation techniques by the military dictatorship in Greece. Starting off this research with one survivor testimony from the proceedings of the first Torturers' Trial (1975) and a few fragments from others, I conducted archival research and numerous interviews with former political prisoners. Many of the stories I am currently working on, I owe to my interviewees and not to my own questions which mostly focused on music and sound imposed from above. Given the above-mentioned biases about music's ennobling character but also the central role it held in the discourse of resistance in Greece, testimonies kept returning to these stories; several of my interviewees talked extensively about how they used music to counter the sense of fear and terror in the very setting in which music was weaponized.

21

Returning to these interviews in recent years, I was able to fully appreciate the important message of entanglement they carried, calling for more nuanced listening and understanding of the ways in which music can be reclaimed or be given different meanings in the midst of abuse and unfreedom. The following examples clarify the point I wish to make. Maria, whose exposure to music from loudspeakers at Giaros prison camp was previously mentioned, was eventually able to shift the meaning of music imposed from above. By associating some of the songs with the man she was in love with at the time, she managed to withstand this inescapable listening. Or, as I have shown elsewhere, during the same period, detainees in solitary confinement faced with imposed silence reclaimed agency through humming, whistling or even coded knocking on the wall. Turning their fellow detainees into a kind of audience, into witnesses of their clandestine experience, they challenged the objectification of brutal torture to which they were exposed and which also included sound.⁴⁰ Through the faint sounds of singing and knocks on the wall, they were able to transgress imposed silence and terror. Music and sound in these settings set into motion a constitutive component of the structure of subjectivity: the ability to address an other (address-ability) and the potential of a response (response-ability). As Lacanian philosopher Mladen Dolar
writes, we are social beings *with* and *through* the voice: voice is at the core of our social bonds and subjectivity itself, as it structurally presupposes an Other.⁴¹ Even the pure cry (*cri pur*) is for psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan a cry *for* someone (*cri pour*), writes Dolar; listening to it presupposes the call and the interpolation of an other, calling for a response.⁴² Acousmatic sound too, such as faint knocks on the wall, can be turned into voice, attaining meaning.

22 This kind of witnessing, a subject that has not been given its due attention, has been beautifully portrayed in the film *A Twelve Year Night* (*La noche de 12 años*, 2018) by Álvaro Brechner. The film tells the story of three imprisoned members of the Tupamaros movement in Uruguay, Mauricio Rosencof, Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro and José Murica (who later became president of Uruguay). Detained in solitary confinement for twelve years, they were essentially treated as hostages. The story unfolds through the ears and eyes of the detainees. Silence pervades. Throughout the film Rosencof and Huidobro devise a language through knocks on the wall in order to communicate, translated to us in the subtitles. Shared by so many political prisoners across the world around that period, this practice reminds us how strategies of survival are also international, just as the methods of torture used to break them. On their 2391st day of detention, the prisoners are transported, hooded and handcuffed, to another secret location. Once they enter their cells Rosencof, who is a poet, starts knocking to see if Huidobro is in the next cell. Relieved and emotional, he “recites” to him a poem through knocks on the wall:

<table><tr><td>Y si este fuera mi último poema<br>insumiso y triste<br>raído pero entero<br>tan solo una palabra escribiría:<br>compañero</td><td>And if this were my last poem<br>rebellious and sad<br>worn out but whole<br>I would only write one word:<br>compañero</td></tr></table>

23 A touching moment, it speaks volumes in its elliptic language and its sounds of silence about comradery, community building, solidarity and communication in the midst of isolation, terror and abuse. Stories like these abound. Music usually features as their driving force. The prison camps on the barren island of Makronissos in Greece during the civil war, infamous for its brutal torture and indoctrination, provide my last and equally striking example. Relentlessly exposed to music and speeches from loudspeakers that made them dizzy, women political prisoners used their song to block the sound imposed from above.⁴³ Joining their voices together, their song became an acoustic shield, countering the damaging effect of the loudspeaker, which had been turned into a sonic panopticon of power. Their song was also intended for the so-called hard-core detainees deemed impossible to “rehabilitate”. Forced to stay out in the open, in natural trenches instead of tents, they were exposed to incessant winds, bitter cold or scorching sun. Recognizing and responding to their ordeal, the women’s song also became a powerful tool for expressing solidarity and resistance, reinforcing community in the midst of terror.

24 Stories like these are not always possible. The blasting of music in the detention centres of the “War on Terror”, often through earphones, obliterated the space for such attempts. However, what I have tried to underline through this brief discussion on witnessing trauma testimony is the need to ask questions that allow for other kinds of
stories or even failed attempts to surface. Researchers need to account, wherever
possible, for the sounds and music of resistance as well as of terror, otherwise we run
the risk of reproducing the soundscapes of power and oppression, missing out the
dynamic of music and sound in these contexts. The process of witnessing thus emerges
as an ethical moment that calls us to make sense and respond to these stories, their
multiple versions and voices, in ways that open up the debate about the violence and
abuse of the past and the present. It allows for a kind of history-telling that emerges
from below, registering all these voices and noises in the historical account, opening up
unanticipated paths for our understanding of the role and impact of music in
detention.

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## NOTES

1. See, for instance, HERZFELD-SCHILD Marie Louise, “‘He Plays on the Pillory’: The Use of Musical Instruments for Punishment in Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era”, PAPAETI Anna and GRANT M. J. (guest eds.), *Music in Detention* (thematic volume) *Torture: Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture*, vol. 23, no. 2, 2013, pp. 14-23; INGRAM Martin, “Juridical Folklore in England Associated with Rough Music”, BROOKS Christopher and LOBBAN Michael (eds.), *Communities and Courts in Britain (1150-1900)*, London, Hambledon Press, 1997, pp. 61-82; THOMPSON E.P., “Rough Music Reconsidered”, *Folklore*, vol. 103, no. 1, 1992, pp. 3-26.

2. See, for instance, BRAUER Juliane, *Musik im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen*, Berlin, Metropol, 2009; BRAUER Juliane, “How Can Music Be Torturous,” *Music and Politics*, vol. X, no. 1, 2016; FACKLER Guido, “Music in Concentration Camps 1933-1945”, trans. Peter Logan, *Music and Politics*, vol. 1, no.1, 2007; GILBERT Shirli, *Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps*, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005; NALIWAJEK-MAZUREK Katarzyna, “Music and Torture in Nazi Sites of Persecution and Genocide in Occupied Poland 1939-1945”, GRANT M. J. and PAPAETI Anna (guest eds.), *the world of music (new series): Music and Torture | Music and Punishment*, vol. 2, no.1, 2013, pp. 31-50.

3. RICE Timothy, 2014. “Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble,” *Yearbook for Traditional Music*, vol. 46, pp. 191-209.

4. CUSICK Suzanne G. “Acoustical Violence and the End of ‘Music’”. Keynote lecture at the international conference *Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Violence, Therapy*, Athens 2019, https://vimeo.com/394653702, accessed on 1 March 2020.

5. SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, “Position Statement on Torture”, 2 February 2007, https://www.ethnomusicology.org/page/PS_Torture, accessed on 23 February 2020.

6. SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN MUSIC, “Resolutions Introduced at the SAM Business Meeting”, 3 March 2007, https://www.american-music.org/page/Resolutions, accessed on 23 February 2020.

7. AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY, “AMS Board Condemns the Use of Music in Physical or Psychological Torture”, AMS Newsletter, vol. 37, no. 2, August 2008, p. 5.
8. CHORNIK Katia, “Should Academic Societies Make Public Statements about Political Incidents”, *RMA Newsletter*, vol. 21, no. 2, November 2017, pp. 3-5. In 2016 the Annual Conference of the Royal Music Association (UK) included the panel “Music, Violence, Justice”. The 2017 annual conference of the British Forum of Ethnomusicology hosted the round table themed “Ethics and Aesthetics of Studying Music in Situations of Conflict and Violence”; its success led to a participatory workshop in 2018.

9. CUSICK Suzanne, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon”, *Revista Transcultural de Música, Transcultural Music Review*, vol. 10, 2006; CUSICK Suzanne, “‘You are in a Place out of the World’: Music in the Detention Camps of the Global ‘War on Terror’”, *Journal of the Society for American Music*, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 1-27; CUSICK Suzanne, “Musicology, Torture, Repair”, *Radical Musicology*, vol. 3, 2008; CUSICK Suzanne, “Toward an Acoustemology of Detention in the Global ‘War on Terror’”, *BORN Georgina* (ed.), *Music, Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 275-291.

10. CHORNIK Katia, “Music and Torture in Chilean Detention Centres: Conversations with an Ex-Agent of Pinochet’s Secret Police”, GRANT M. J. and PAPAETI Anna (guest eds.), *the world of music* (new series), *Music and Torture* | *Music and Punishment*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51-65; NALBADIDACIS, Janis, *In the Dungeons of the Dictatorship: A Comparative Study of Centres of Torture in Argentina and Greece during the last Military Dictatorships*, PhD thesis 2019, Humboldt University, Berlin, pp. 155-156.

11. Cusick has spoken about the link of music to violence as a deep-seated trauma of musicology. See, CUSICK, “Acoustical Violence”.

12. Ibid.

13. See, for instance, DAUGHTRY Martin, *Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq*, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2015; GOODMAN Steve, *Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Technology of Fear*, Cambridge (MA), MIT, 2009; LABELLE Brandon, *Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life*, New York and London, Continuum, 2010.

14. The conferences were organized in the context of two Marie Curie Fellowships I held at the University of Goettingen (acronym MUSTERMAN; https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/music+in+detention%2C+two-day+international+conference/364762.html) and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, respectively (acronym MUSDEWAR; https://soundscapesofdetention.com/conference/).

15. THEOPHRASTUS, *Theophrastus of Eresus. Commentary. Sources of Ethics*, vol. 6, no. 1, ed. FORTENBAUCH W.W., Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2011; TSETOS Markos, *Music in Modern Philosophy. From Kant to Adorno*, Athens, Alexandria, 2012 (in Greek); PLATO, *Republic*, ed. FERRARI G.R.F., trans. T. Griffith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; PROVENZA Antonietta, “Aristoxenus and Music Therapy”, HUFFMANN C.A. (ed.), *Aristoxenus of Tarentum. Discussion*, New Brunswick and London, Transaction, 2011, pp. 91-128.

16. SHARROCK Justine, “The Torture Playlist”, *Mother Jones*, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/02/torture-playlist/, 22 February 2008, accessed on 20 February 2020. Suzanne Cusick critically discusses in length reactions on music torture in the blogosphere, underlining the undertones of homophobia and heterosexual fantasy. CUSICK, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon”.

17. See, PAPAETI Anna, “Music, Torture, Testimony: Re-Opening the Case of the Greek Junta (1967-1974)”, GRANT M. J. and PAPAETI Anna (guest eds.), *Music and Torture* (special volume) *the world of music* (new series), vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, pp. 67-89.

18. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, “Situation in Greece”, London, 27 January 1968, p. 4.

19. CHRYTROSCHEK Tristan, * Songs of War: Music as Weapon*, A&O Buro, 2010; documentary.

20. Interview with Yannis, Athens 2012.
21. MCCOY Alfred W, *A Question of Torture*. CIA Interrogation. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2006. See also CHRYTROSCHek, *Songs of War*; CUSICK, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon”.

22. CIA, *Kubark Counter Intelligence Interrogation Manual*, 1963. In a secret 1992 report written for the Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney, Kubark and later manuals based on these concepts were condemned as containing “offensive and objectionable material [...] concerning respect for human rights”. See ANONYMOUS, “Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past”, *National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 122* (The National Security Archive), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/, accessed on 23 February 2020.

23. CIA, pp. 4, 86.

24. On coercive interrogation techniques and “learned helplessness”, see BASOĞLOU Metin (ed.), *Torture and Its Definition in International Law. An Interdisciplinary Approach*, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 49-59, 409-432.

25. Ruhal Ahmed testimony, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EuIlAiFWQc, accessed on 20 February 2020.

26. Binyam Mohamed's testimony relayed by his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith in a video campaign against music torture by the non profit organization Reprieve, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5Cglt_MdF8, accessed on 20 February 2020.

27. BASOĞLOU Metin, “A Multivariate Contextual Analysis of Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment: Is the Distinction Real or Apparent?”, *Archives of General Psychiatry*, vol. 64, 2010, pp. 277-284; BASOĞLOU Metin, “Definition of Torture in US Law. Does It Provide Legal Cover for Enhanced Interrogation Techniques?”, BASOĞLOU Metin (ed.), *Torture and Its Definition in International Law. An Interdisciplinary Approach*, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 409-432; BASOĞLOU Metin and REYES Harnán, “Control as a Defining Characteristic of Torture. A Learning Theory Analysis of the Kubark Interrogation Manual”, ibid, pp. 49-59.

28. MCDERMOTT Terry, “In 9/11 Proceedings, Once-Forbidden Topic Is Front and Center: Torture”, *LA Times*, 20 January 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-20/ksm-guantanamo-trial-torture, accessed on 25 February 2020.

29. MITCHELL James with HARLOW Bill, *Enhanced Interrogation. Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America*, New York, Crown Forum, 2016.

30. ANONYMOUS, “Royal Opera House loses appeal over viola player’s hearing”, BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47965734, accessed on 25 February 2020.

31. EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS, “Case of Ireland versus the United Kingdom, 1978”, Strasbourg, http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentId=695383&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649, accessed 20 February 2020.

32. Judge Dimitrios Evrigenis cited in ibid., 124.

33. See DUFFY Aoife, “The European Court of Human Rights Exercises due Deference to Great Britain: Ireland v United Kingdom Redux”, *Human Rights Centre Blog*, University of Essex, 17 May 2018, https://hrcessex.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/the-european-court-of-human-rights-exercises-due-deference-to-great-britain-ireland-v-united-kingdom-redux-2018/, accessed 20 February 2020; GREENE Alan, “Ireland v the UK and the Hooded Men: A Missed Opportunity?”, *The Strasbourg Observers*, 25 April 2018, https://strasbourgobservers.com/2018/04/25/ireland-v-the-uk-and-the-hooded-men-a-missed-opportunity/, accessed 20 February 2020.

34. Cited in GREENE, “Ireland v the UK and the Hooded Men”.

35. CUSICK, “You are in a Place out of the World”, pp. 1-27.

36. WORTHINGTON Andy, “Hit me Baby One More Time”, *Counterpunch*, 15 October 2008, https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/12/15/hit-me-baby-one-more-time/, accessed on 2 March 2020;
ROSS, Alex, “When Music Is Violence”, *The New Yorker*, 27 June 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/04/when-music-is-violence, accessed on 2 March 2020.

37. **CHORNIK, “Music and Torture”**, pp. 57-58.

38. See **PAPAETI Anna**, “Music and Re-Education in Greek Prison Camps: From Makronisos (1947–1953) to Giaros (1967–1968)”, **PAPAETI Anna** and **GRANT M. J.** (guest eds.), *Torture: Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture: ‘Music in Detention’*, vol. 23, no. 2, 2013, pp. 34–43.

39. M. J. Grant discusses these similarities in brief in ""Human Rights Have Made a Difference": An Interview with Manfred Nowak", *the world of music (new series): Music and Torture | Music and Punishment*, vol. 1, no. 2 (2013), pp. 97–98. Burgess' biographer Roger Lewis has speculated that the author was aware of the CIA mind control programme through his employment at the Colonial Services in Malaya, an argument that has, nevertheless, not been substantiated by evidence. MORRISON James, "CIA Mind-Control Trials Revealed as Secret Inspiration Behind 'A Clockwork Orange'", *The Independent*, 13 October 2002, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/cia-mind-control-trials-revealed-as-secret-inspiration-behind-a-clockwork-orange-139895.html, accessed 27 February 2020.

40. **PAPAETI Anna**, “Singing out Terror: Music Communities in the Detention Centres of the Military Dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974)”, **THEODOSIOU Aspasia** and **KALLIMOPOULOU Eleni**, *Music Communities in Greece of the 21st Century: Ethnographic Listening and Perspectives* (forthcoming, in Greek).

41. **DOLAR Mladen**, *A Voice and Nothing More*, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2006, p. 14.

42. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

43. **VERVENIOTI Tasoula**, “Makronisi: Testimonies of Women”, **BOURNAZOS Stratis** and **SAKELLAROPOULOS Tassos** (eds.), *Historical Place and Historical Memory: The Paradigm of Makronissos*, Athens, Philistor, 2000, p. 109.

ABSTRACTS

This essay explores the late engagement of music research with the long-standing yet overlooked association between music, violence and terror. In mapping this new field, it seeks to understand this latency as a disciplinary trauma. It examines music's integral role in new technologies of terror emerging during the Cold War, the cultural biases that have turned it into an elusive means of torture, and the effects stemming from the overshadowing of its damaging potential. Focusing on the notion of witnessing, it highlights the need for more nuanced soundscapes of detention that explore the entanglement of negative and positive uses of music as they are imposed from above and reclaimed from below.

Cet article interroge le caractère tardif de l'intérêt de la recherche musicologique pour l'association durable et néanmoins négligée entre musique, violence et terreur. En cartographiant ce nouveau champ de recherche, il s'agit de comprendre une telle période de latence en tant que traumatisme disciplinaire. Il s'agit aussi d'examiner le rôle constitutif de la musique dans les nouvelles technologies de la terreur issues de la guerre froide, les préjugés culturels qui l'ont transformée en un moyen de torture difficile à saisir ainsi que les effets qui
découlent de l'ignorance de son potentiel de nuisance. Mettant l'accent sur la notion de témoignage, l'article souligne la nécessité de concevoir des paysages sonores plus nuancés pour les espaces de détention, en explorant les usages négatifs et positifs de la musique tels qu'ils sont imposés d'en haut ou réappropriés d'en bas.

## INDEX

**Keywords:** music, detention, violence, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, subjectivity, witnessing, musicology, ethnomusicology

**Mots-clés:** musique, détention, violence, torture, traitements inhumains et dégradants, subjectivité, témoignage, musicologie, ethnomusicologie

## AUTHOR

### ANNA PAPAETI

Anna Papaeti writes about opera and musical theatre, the nexus of music, trauma, and violence, and the interlinking of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Her post-doctoral research has been supported by Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (FP7, Horizon 2020), Research Centre for the Humanities, Athens, Onassis Foundation, and DAAD. She has co-edited two journal volumes on music, torture, and detention, and has written widely on the topic. She has also created the (sound) installations *The Dark Side of the Tune* (2016) and *New Parthenon* (2019) with Nektarios Pappas, and the podcast *The Undoing of Music* (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2018).
# On Sensationalism, Violence and Academic Knowledge

Du sensationnalisme, de la violence et de la connaissance scientifique
Sobre sensacionalismo, violencia y conocimiento académico

Hettie Malcomson

## AUTHOR'S NOTE

### Acknowledgements

This project was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship grant. I am extremely grateful to the research participants for generously giving me their time and insights. I also wish to thank friends and colleagues who provided really helpful comments and suggestions (you know who you are). All shortcomings are my own.

1. In his reflection on death in the Mexican/US border city of Ciudad Juárez, journalist Charles Bowden wrote about a hypothetical performance by ghosts where voices would be quiet and other sounds, including post-death silence, subdued; a performance where:

> We will not allow anyone with answers to be present. Explanations will be killed on sight. Theories strangled by my own hands. No one can speak of cartels if he [sic] is not a member of a cartel [...] Academic commentators must show video of themselves at the killings or having beers with the killers before they will be allowed to say a single word.¹

2. Bowden's somewhat macho stance may seem extreme, but I contend that it is a position that must be engaged with seriously. It raises methodological, analytical and representational issues that continue to challenge scholars addressing bellicose violence: Is it ethical to write about terror, pain and despair from afar; to provide answers and explanations; to use theoretical material in such discussions? Can sensationalism ever be justified in analyses of bellicose violence? Are we tuned in enough to notice the distinction between sensational and non-sensational representations? What kind of silences might we allow for? In this essay, I address
these questions in relation to necropolitical Mexico, drawing from my empirical research with musicians commissioned to write *narco rap*, producers and consumers of *rap del barrio* (which is sometimes linked to gangs); and hip hop artists protesting the disappearances, homicides, systematic violence and impunity enjoyed by criminal organisations and state institutions alike.

## Lunching with someone who has killed another human

3 Whilst researching Mexican popular music, I have lunched with two men who told me that they have killed others. The first was someone I know well, a former security guard I spent many hours dancing with while researching the popular music-dance form, danzón: my curiosity got the better of me when we were eating one day, and I asked him if he had killed anyone. He responded in unemotional, factual terms, describing an event where a man drew a firearm in a dance hall, and he reacted by grabbing the gun and killing the man. This seemed to him like a sensible solution. I was shocked, but the account did not stick to me for long.

4 The second time I knowingly lunched with someone who had killed people was more difficult. This man was just tagging along with some rappers I was interviewing. While we were eating, it was revealed that he was not only a rap fan, but had been "one of Them" (an ex-narco), and I was encouraged to interview him.² He was delighted to consent, and I was keen to get his perspective on who commissioned narco rap, how, the veracity of the information They gave musicians, and how this genre was consumed.³ I set out my interests and let him speak. He told me how he had killed seven people at first hand (not counting those involved in shoot outs); how he was distressed by the sounds that their bodies made as he did so; how hearing the screams of his friends being tortured over the walkie-talkie disturbed him; and how he had made stew out of body parts while tanked up on cocaine. I stopped him, aware that I was not coping with hearing first-hand about the visceral details of such gruesome violence. It continues to unsettle me.⁴ Trust, empathy and power were entangled in our relationship in ways I had not experienced before. Part confessional, part a plea for acceptance as a humane being, but also part assertion of power should I transgress.

5 Bowden's proposal that "academic commentators must show video of themselves at the killings or having beers with the killers" presumably refers to the second, more traumatic kind of encounter I describe here.⁵ However, sharing experiences (beers, lunch) with someone who has killed another human is surely less the point, than the relationship of the scholar to that person, to that violence. I do not believe that presence or trauma (be it primary or vicarious) are prerequisites for a researcher to speak about violence, but I do think that some sense of the visceral can be helpful in not falling into gratuitous sensationalism.

## Sensationalism

6 Narco-culture has increasingly become a focus of academic study, and I have often felt outraged at the way in which victims and/or perpetrators of Mexico's bellicose violence are sensationalised, objectified and de-individualised by academics at conferences, with salacious accounts of dismembered women as "territories" in
analyses of femicides, of spectacular deaths as “exchange commodities” in a system of
narco accumulation. My argument is as much with analysts of literature and popular
culture, as with music scholars. Violence in Mexico is notoriously spectacular, but there
is no justification for its sensationalism to be furthered in academic accounts. Where is
the humanity? I decry. The suffering, the agony of torture, rape, pre-death horror. The
silenced bodies unearthed in *fosas* (mass graves), their skeletal mouths still screaming.

7 Sensationalism is distinguished from individual sensory knowledge by its relationality, specifically the relationship between a phenomenon and the sensed responses to it (be they emotional, intellectual, physical or otherwise), responses which are magnified in relation to measured rationality and so-called tastefulness. Back in 1992, in her analysis of mid-nineteenth century British sensation novels, Ann Cvetkovich argued that sensationalism: produces the *embodiment*, in both the literal and figurative senses, of social structures. It not only renders them concrete, by embodying them in a single and powerful representation, but the responses it produces are bodily or physical experiences that seem immediate and natural.⁶

8 Moreover, Cvetkovich proposed, sensationalism can perform political work by making phenomena visible, often via spectacle. She evoked the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement of the 1980s (which emerged in the USA), where sensationalism was “endorsed as a useful tactic for goading people into an awareness of social problems”.⁷ Cvetkovich poses the question: “what political possibilities are overlooked when sensationalism is condemned?”⁸ In the case of ACT UP, the stigma attached to the bodies of those subjected to state violence was politicised. Yet in necropolitical contexts such as twenty-first century Mexico, contesting state and criminal violence can be suicidal, and insensitivity to sadistic, spectacular violence is widespread, as Berlanga Gayón has explored, making it difficult to harness sensationalism as a tool for political ends, particularly since it is an important element of narco-propaganda.⁹ Thus, in response to the question of whether sensationalism can be justified in analyses of bellicose violence, I would argue that in necropolitical contexts, the answer is no.

## Answers, explanations and theories

9 So if the use of sensationalism is inappropriate in necropolitical contexts, might there still be a place for answers and explanations, for the use theoretical material in analyses of brutal violence? It is not uncommon for researchers from the global north writing about necropolitical Mexico to justify their research with broad claims and even solutions to the drug-related, capitalism-fuelled violence in the country. I have been culprit to this, pointing to how the criminalisation of drugs sustains brutal violence and inequalities, and contesting the corruption and impunity which feeds this system. Yet I am a sociologist of music, an ethnomusicologist, without in-depth knowledge of broad socio-political issues. My primary hope is that my research on hip hop can do specific work: to reveal the mechanisms through which music and popular culture reproduce narco violence — by romanticising it, as well as critiquing it.¹⁰ While I disagree with Bowden’s position that answers and explanations should be “killed”, I also recognise that providing answers and explanations can do more work to make a scholar feel “good” about themselves and their discipline, than having an impact in the
social world.¹¹ It is not uncommon for scholars to claim the uniqueness of their subject area in providing broad insights into human experience, for example that music provides understandings of violence that are particularly ground-breaking. I think we need to look ourselves hard in the mirror and reflect on whether we ask too much of our disciplines. Not enough people read academic texts to warrant a claim that research on hip hop is likely to stop violence in Mexico, but I do hope, maybe naively, that it could shift certain people's understanding.

10 In considering the appropriateness of using theoretical material in analyses of horrific violence, it is helpful to turn to work on film and photography where the glamorisation of horror has long been discussed. In her classic text *Regarding the Pain of Others*, Susan Sontag points to the tension between photographs as documentary and photographs as transforming their subjects into aesthetic objects. This tension is acute in war photography where critics consider suffering to be incompatible with beauty, and captions that moralise to be inappropriate. "In this view" Sontag argues, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture's status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!¹²

11 War photography is a useful analogue for thinking about research material and theory in war-like contexts: like photography, scholarly analysis transforms and may be critiqued if overly theoretical about suffering subjects. Documentation may be considered more appropriate in depicting suffering, rather than a theoretical contribution to disciplinary and broader understandings. Likewise, analyses should not be moralising. Scholarly analysis of war zones, like war photography, (and it is apposite to quote Sontag again): "gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!"¹³ Where the spectacularisation of bellicose violence is combined with the fetishization of (usually French) theory, which is common in hegemonic, global northern musicology, humanities and social science, I contend that the ethics of global northern scholars using (colonial) theory in analyses of bellicose violence in the global south becomes ever more dubious.¹⁴

## Silence and humanity

12 To conclude, let me clarify that I believe that silencing is counterproductive: there must always be space for a multiplicity of perspectives, for discussion and critique, in order to move ideas forward to enable collective action.¹⁵ What is key in scholarship on bellicose violence is that people's humanity is maintained. Too often, victims and perpetrators are objectified. The ex-narco I interviewed told me that he often wondered who those people were, the ones he killed. He knew that they may not have worked for the other side, that they might have been innocent, but there was no going back after a certain point – they knew too much, or so he thought. That wondering who they were is not remorse, but it does bestow humanity. It is harder to sensationalise, to objectify others, when we are talking about individuals we have engaged with, people with a name, a life, a story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERLANGA GAYÓN Mariana, “El Espectáculo de la Violencia en el México Actual: Del Feminicidio al Juvenicidio”, *Athenea Digital*, vol. 15, no. 4, 2015, pp. 105-128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/athenea.1556

BORNSTEIN Erica, “Child Sponsorship, Evangelism, and Belonging in the Work of World Vision Zimbabwe”, *American Ethnologist*, vol. 28, no. 3, 2001, pp. 595-622. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.3.595

BOWDEN Charles, *Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields*, New York City, Nation Books, 2010.

BURGOS DÁVILA César Jesús. "'¡Que Truene la Tambora y Que Suene el Acordeón!': Composición, Difusión y Consumo Juvenil de Narcocorridos en Sinaloa", TRANS: *Revista Transcultural de Música, Transcultural Music Review*, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 1-24. https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/public/docs/01a-trans-2016.pdf

CAMPBELL Howard, "Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican 'Drug War': An Anthropological Perspective", *Latin American Perspectives*, vol. 41, no. 2, 2014, pp. 60-77. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X12443519

CVETKOVICH Ann, *Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism*, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992.

DICKSON-SWIFT Virginia, JAMES Erica L., KIPPEN Sandra, LIAMPUTTONG Pranee, "Researching Sensitive Topics: Qualitative Research as Emotion Work", *Qualitative Research*, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61-79. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794108098031

DUBBERLEY Sam, GRANT Michele, "Journalism and Vicarious Trauma: A Guide for Journalists, Editors and News Organisations", 2017. Available at: https://firstdraftnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vicarioustrauma.pdf, consulted on 05 January 2020).

EDBERG Mark, *El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S. Mexico Border*, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004.

FISHER William F., "Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices", *Annual Review of Anthropology*, vol. 26, no. 1, 1997, pp. 439-464. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.439

MALCOMSON Hettie, "Aficionados, Academics, and Danzón Expertise: Exploring Hierarchies in Popular Music Knowledge Production", *Ethnomusicology*, vol. 58, no. 2, 2014, pp. 222-253. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0222

MALCOMSON Hettie, "Contesting Resistance, Protesting Violence: Women, War and Hip Hop in Mexico", *Music and Arts in Action*, vol. 7, no. 1, 2019a, pp. 46-63, http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/202/190

MALCOMSON Hettie, "Negotiating Violence and Creative Agency in Commissioned Mexican Narco Rap", *Bulletin of Latin American Research*, vol. 38, no.3, 2019b, pp. 347-362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12977

SIMONETT Helena, "Narcocorridos: An Emerging Micromusic of Nuevo L.A.", *Ethnomusicology*, vol. 45, no. 2, 2001, pp. 315-337. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/852677
SIMONETT Helena, “Los Gallos Valientes: Examining Violence in Mexican Popular Music”, *Trans*, vol. 10, 2006, https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/149/los-gallos-valientes-examining-violence-in-mexican-popular-music

SONTAG Susan, *Regarding the Pain of Others*, New York, Picador, 2003.

VALENZUELA ARCE José Manuel, *Jefe de Jefes: Corridos y Narcocultura en México*, México, Hoja Casa Editorial, 2003.

## NOTES

1. BOWDEN Charles, *Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields*, New York, Nation Books, 2010, p. 209.

2. I use the term “narco” here as it is used widely in academia, but want to highlight that it is a stigmatising term which was rarely used by the rappers or ex-narco I interviewed: the terms “Them”, *malandros* (badmen) and mafia were instead employed. The term narco rap, however, is a vernacular term.

3. See MALCOMSON Hettie, “Negotiating Violence and Creative Agency in Commissioned Mexican Narco Rap”, *Bulletin of Latin American Research*, vol. 38, no. 3, 2019b, pp. 347-362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12977.

4. Analysis of, and advice regarding, traumatic fieldwork encounters and vicarious trauma is provided by DICKSON-SWIFT Virginia, JAMES Erica L., KIPPEN Sandra, LIAMPUTTONG Pranee, “Researching Sensitive Topics: Qualitative Research as Emotion Work”, *Qualitative Research*, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61-79, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794108098031; and DUBBERLEY Sam, GRANT Michele, “Journalism and Vicarious Trauma: A Guide for Journalists, Editors and News Organisations”, 2017. Available at: https://firstdraftnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/vicarioustrauma.pdf (consulted on 05 January 2020).

5. BOWDEN Charles, *Murder City*, p. 209.

6. CVETKOVICH Ann, *Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism*, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992, p. 24.

7. *Ibid.*, p. 24.

8. *Ibid.*, p. 24.

9. Regarding indifference to violence in Mexico, see BERLANGA GAYÓN Mariana, “El Espectáculo de la Violencia en el México Actual: Del Feminicidio al Juvenicidio”, *Athenea Digital*, vol. 15, no. 4, 2015, pp. 105-128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/athenea.1556. Regarding narco-propaganda, see for example, CAMPBELL Howard, “Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican ‘Drug War’: An Anthropological Perspective”, *Latin American Perspectives*, vol. 41, no. 2, 2014, pp. 60-77. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X12443519.

10. In conversation with important interventions on narcomusic and violence, such as: BURGOS DÁVILA César Jesús, “‘¡Que Truene la Tambora y Que Suene el Acordeón!’: Composición, Difusión y Consumo Juvenil de Narcocorridos en Sinaloa”, *Trans*, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 1-24, https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/public/docs/01a-trans-2016.pdf; EDBERG Mark, *El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S. Mexico Border*, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004; SIMONETT Helena, “Narcocorridos: An Emerging Micromusic of Nuevo L.A.”, *Ethnomusicology*, vol. 45, no. 2, 2001, pp. 315-337. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/852677; SIMONETT Helena, “Los Gallos Valientes: Examining Violence in Mexican Popular Music”, *Trans*, vol. 10, 2006, https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/149/los-gallos-valientes-examining-violence-in-mexican-popular-music; VALENZUELA ARCE José Manuel, *Jefe de Jefes: Corridos y Narcocultura en México*, México, Hoja Casa Editorial, 2003.