Themes of My Work
WAR AND SOCIETY
THE SOUNDS OF “TOTAL WAR” Excerpt from Instrument of War
The Civil War…marked the start of a new epoch of war-making, with deep implications for musical activity in the ranks. Unlike previous American conflicts, the Civil War represented the mobilization of the modern nation-state, “organizing self-consciously as such for war,” as the historian Richard English put it. With the vast expansion of power of the federal government, the Civil War was a military action of a different order, underpinned by novel ideological and material conditions. The centrality of slavery meant the war cut to the core of the nation’s political and social identity. At the same time, the conflict heralded a seismic shift in warfare globally. In this new “age of systems” (as military historian and theorist Martin Van Creveld has called it), railroads, telegraphy, and other complex forms of logistical and technological organization remade how societies went to war. Other scholars have characterized it as the first instance of “total war”—a conflict pitting not only military forces against one another but entire societies and their resource.
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This “totality” involved a transformation in the way war sounded. Thanks to a range of novel weapons—louder, more accurate, more powerful—the Civil War represented a new kind of sensory experience, dense with meaningful sounds embedded in multiple, sometimes overlapping soundscapes. The most intense of these was the battlefield, an environment whose “keynotes” were gunfire, ordnance, and the screams and cries of the wounded and dying. In the era before smokeless gunpowder, the air of the battlefield was often thick with swirling, pungent smoke, leaving soldiers with little more than sound to inform them about what was happening around them. Amid this cacophony, recognizing and interpreting aural information correctly was a matter of survival. Learning which sounds to notice and make sense of—and which to ignore—could mean the difference between life and death, a peculiar system of listening that the scholar J. Martin Daughtry has called the “auditory regime” of wartime violence, that is, a conceptual grid for making sense of the peculiar embodied knowledge of combat.
UNDERSTANDING WAR ANEW Excerpt from Instrument of War
[This book moves] chronologically from the Civil War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, exploring the multiple ways music has been involved in making and maintaining America’s soldiers. It is tempting to say these pages demonstrate how musical activity from boot camp to battlefield has been a lubricant in the American war machine, enabling its gears to turn smoothly, regularly, with relatively little friction. In many respects this is so. Yet such a metaphor threatens to mislead, suggesting a mechanism driven by an independent motive force, which obscures that this is a book about people. Implying that warriors are gears may dehumanize war-making; flatten the complicated, three-dimensional experience of soldiering; and oversimplify the multifaceted work that musical activity has done in the lives of the men and women who have fought America’s wars. Just as the military contains tensions, differences, and contradictions, the functions of music likewise are never monolithic. If music has been a lubricant in the war machine, it has also been more besides.
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Recognizing what music has done in American war-making over time can alter our historical perspective, for it reveals new pathways for understanding the relationship of war and society, of sound and the state. Predicated on not just looking at the past but listening too, this kind of history offers an alternative approach to some of the most radically transformative periods of the American experience, generating new questions about what made these pivotal chapters in the nation’s history unfold as they did. For a nation to go to war, individuals must go to war—individuals who, it must be stressed, would generally rather not. Attending to music can help us comprehend the complex processes by which such individuals have been transformed into, and nourished as, soldiers. It can elucidate what has made the work of waging war possible on a personal, emotional, corporeal level. In so doing, this history connects diverse challenges faced by every country that goes to war: how to fill the ranks of the military; how to train ordinary civilians for the work of harming perfect strangers; how to maintain warriors, through not only the most strenuous, demanding aspects of soldiering but also the most boring and tedious; and how to prepare soldiers for the return to civilian life when they lay down their weapons. Introducing music into an analysis of large-scale state violence shows how tightly these issues are bound.
What music has done for soldiers complemented what it has done for the state, despite their discrete interests. Tuning in to the musical practices of the armed forces can enhance our grasp of what has motivated military personnel and kept them going. No less consequential than the ways music has made America’s warriors are the ways it has enabled them to preserve a kind of affective autonomy, express themselves, exert control (however limited and ephemeral) over their circumstances, connect with others (comrades at their side, loved ones back home), and, in restricted but meaningful ways, push back against the state. If major military conflicts have been a consequential part of US history—as undoubtedly they have—then their musical dimensions warrant our attention. Attending to these sounds can help us think anew about how wars happen.