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Music and Agency in War and Other Conflicts
Renaissance military campaigns requiring chapel musicians, Ottoman bands striking terror into Habsburg hearts, American interrogators weaponizing music for torture, musicians from Aesop’s trumpeter to contemporary Iraqi performers executed as seditious—this article explores music’s active agency in war and conflict across centuries.
Contributors were invited to reflect on the ways in which music and sound have functioned as an active agent—not just a passive reflection—during times of conflict and war.
One clear example is the role of patriotic songs—especially those that regain relevance across generations. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the old patriotic song “Ой у лузі червона калина” (Oh, the red viburnum in the meadow) has re-emerged as a powerful symbol of national identity and resistance. Originally the 1914 anthem of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, the song was banned during the Soviet era but remained dormant in Ukraine’s cultural memory. In 2022 “Kalyna” re-entered public consciousness and media as a sonic emblem of defiance. Its global resonance was amplified by the English rock band Pink Floyd, whose rendition—titled “Hey, Hey, Rise Up!”—reached international audiences. Today, in Kyiv, the song can be heard regularly in restaurants, shopping centers, the metro, and other public places—a reminder that music, far from being a passive reflection, actively shapes collective spirit in times of conflict.
Music and violence have been engaged in a tight dance throughout the entire history of armed conflict; this relationship is so intimate and longstanding that it is virtually impossible to imagine a war in which music would not serve as a ritualistic marking of time, a technology for intimidating the enemy and galvanizing one’s comrades-in-arms, or a mode of lament and remembrance for those who lost their lives. However, the particular dynamics of that relationship are always fueled by local conditions. During the US-led war in Iraq, for example, US military service members regularly used recorded music (mostly heavy metal and gangster rap) to “amp up”—to attain the heightened psychological state needed to be brave and/or deadly on the battlefield.1 This practice treated music as a kind of sonorous amphetamine, while its opposite, the “cool down playlist,” was a substitute for barbiturates—soldiers listened to Enya and Bach and a wide variety of others to calm themselves at the end of the day. A more aggressive deployment of music took place in 2004, when American military PsyOps (Psychological Operations) units set up large speakers near the front lines during the second Battle of Fallujah, through which they projected loud rock music in an attempt to frustrate, exhaust, and provoke Sunni fighters in the city into revealing themselves. Most chilling, perhaps, was the widespread tactic in detention facilities scattered throughout the “Global War on Terror,” in which interrogators from the US military and intelligence services bombarded detainees with loud music, often for many hours at a time, in an attempt to render them more susceptible to their questions.2 During the war, music could serve as evidence: Iraqi civilians passing through checkpoints could be detained and interrogated if cassette recordings of insurgent music or chanting were found in their cars. Or it could serve as a death sentence: fundamentalists within the Iraqi insurgency were known to murder musicians and bomb music stores for violating their edicts against secular music. It is important to note that each of these practices had antecedents in other conflicts, but they came together in Iraq in a unique form that was entangled with the technologies, ideologies and strange contingencies of that place and time.
Music has often been utilized during instances of war and conflict by both hegemons and the marginalized. As a form of discursive culture, music can actively control or shift public sentiments in favor of those shaping its messages. I focus on postcolonial Africa for examples of music use by hegemons and the oppressed, specifically the development of Guinean Afropop under the socialist authoritarian regime of Sekou Touré, lasting from 2 October 1958 until his death on 26 March 1984. Under Touré, Guinean Afropop was used by the authoritarian government to serve national goals against the contexts of Western imperialism, democracy, and internal resistance to its regime. After disbanding private Afropop groups and banning European music, Touré and government officials from the ruling Parti Democratique de Guinee (PDG) personally curated musical artists across two dozen ethnic groups at state-sponsored festivals. While Guinean Afropop itself drew from the West African palmwine and high-life musics, Cuban music, jazz, and Congolese rhumba, the main melodic and lyrical content was from the Mande jelilu (griot) tradition. The music itself praised Touré, Touré’s family, the PDG, the Guinean revolution, the army, and other forms of government hegemony. The prominent Guinean Afropop group Bembeya Jazz National created “Armée Guinéenne” along with hundreds of songs by multiple state-sponsored groups in praise of Guinea’s authoritarian regime. For an example of music use by the marginalized, I examine the Afropop of Ugandan human rights activist, politician, and popular musician Bobi Wine. Wine’s music discursively champions “people power,” a youth counterpublic named in alignment with his political slogan, ”people power, our power.” The music draws from traditional and contemporary Baganda musics and popular musics of the Black Atlantic, such as reggae, dancehall, and afrobeats. Songs such as “Bikwase Kyagulanyi” (Hand them to Kyagulanyi, 2016), “Zukuka Uganda” (Wake up Uganda, 2018), and the well-known “Freedom” (2019) attract supporters to vote for him as a youth candidate that confronts the authoritarian regime headed by the dictatorial Yoweri Museveni in Ugandan postcolonial politics. Wine’s political rise has not come without governmental backlash however; he has survived several assassination attempts and has experienced periods of exile from the country.
I think of the Aesop Fable of the military trumpeter taken captive. In this tale we learn that a musician from an army band is about to be executed. He pleads for his life on the basis that as he has played no part in any fighting, he should not be held to account for the violence that unfolded. His captors reply, however, that by inspiring others to fight through his music he is just as guilty as those who do the actual killing. If nothing else, the ancient provenance of at least a version of this tale would suggest that people have long held that music, and thus also the musicians who perform it, can be an “active agent” in times of conflict.
We should not restrict the relevance of this observation merely to examples of music performed on the battlefield like we have in Aesop’s tale of the unfortunate trumpeter. Music is also involved in shaping the kinds of political and cultural environments that typically precede military campaigns by means of its capacity to help define and ritualize the kinds of identity (such as tribal, national, religious, or racial) that are commonly used to motivate such an organized act of violence. Music thus not only can help us overcome our common, instinctive, prohibition against killing others on the battlefield, it can also help us “mask what is frighteningly horrible, ugly, and cruel about war”3 more generally.
When we think of music and the military, images might surface of musicians in military uniform marching in lavish ceremonial parades or entertaining dispirited troops abroad. Yet musicians have been active in real wars for hundreds of years, as soldiers entered the battlefield, sounding wind, brass, and percussion instruments. In the Ottoman–Habsburg wars of the sixteenth century, for example, the Ottoman mehterhâne (military musicians) wielded the thunderous, penetrating sounds of the zurna (double-reed instrument), boru (a natural trumpet), davul (two-headed round drum), nakkâre (paired small drums), kös (timpani attached to a horse or camel), and çağana (jingling bells).4 The bands signaled troop movements, but more than that, they symbolized the sultan’s power—not only motivating and regulating the emotions of Ottoman troops, but in the same moment, inspiring fear in the hearts of the “infidels” with their sheer volume.5 In Istanbul, the mehterhâne trumpeted the sultan’s victories in processions which brought Muslims, Jews, and orthodox Christians together, entrained to the rhythms of a multi-sensory pageantry.6 The mehter’s arresting sounds joined thundering muskets and cannon fire, the cries of children, the whirling of Sufis, jingling bells on camels, and myriad guilds.
Such sonic arrays are not limited to the Ottomans, of course. Austrian Habsburg trumpeters and drummers, often mounted on horses, rallied Emperor Rudolph II’s (1552–1612) forces as they encountered the more powerful Ottomans, signaling troop movements and regulating emotions as the soldiers faced the more powerful (and louder) mehter. If successful, the sounds of trumpets, cannons, gunfire, and drums transported the sounds of battle back into the city as part of elaborate victory parades in which soldiers joined with the urban faithful.7 The softer sounds of sacred songs and sung litanies mingled with those of the battle to project a Catholic identity within oftentimes multi-confessional urban spaces. In such victory parades, in Istanbul or Prague, the faithful of the city marched as momentary sonic soldiers of the sultan or emperor—the sounds of dissent momentarily suppressed as political leaders attempted to project the hegemony of state and religion. Militaries, then and now, in battle or ceremonial parade project sonic power as both psychological weapon and propaganda.
The idea of music for war in the Middle Ages and Renaissance often conjures up images of military bands on the battlefield. Though these certainly played an important role in battles, music in the Renaissance battle entourage was considerably diverse. Renaissance kings brought with them household instrumentalists, jesters, and even polyphonic chapel singers. Far from passive reflection, music played an integral role in the devotional and social fabric of military life. Supplications for and commemorations of victory through singing were central in Renaissance thinking about music and war. Burgundian chronicler Olivier de la Marche once encouraged his fifteenth century audience to remember the story of the Capetian king Robert II, whose ability to sing along with his clerics in divine supplication was perceived to have been the source of the king’s military success.8. Secular music was also heard at camp and on the front for the entertainment and comfort of princes and soldiers alike. Milanese ambassador Giovanni Pietro Panigarola reported that Charles the Bold heard music every night in his tent during the Siege of Neuss (1474–75).9 These practices carried great risks. The fact that chapel singers and household musicians were expected to participate in wars directly, meant they were occasionally confronted with the realities of violence firsthand. In 1507, for instance, the chapel of Louis XII was accosted by enemy assailants in Alessandria during their participation in the campaign against Genoa and were forced to flee the city in haste.10 Similarly, we learn from French poet Jean Marot, that the royal jester Triboulet was present in the king’s retinue during the siege of Peschiera in 1509 and was so frightened by the sound of the cannons that he fled and hid under a bed at camp.11 Such stories are often far from mind when we think about the performance of motets and songs in lavish courts and churches, but they serve as a reminder of the manner in which war shaped the lived experiences of musicians of many kinds.
References
- J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- My colleague Suzanne Cusick has written powerfully about this practice, for example, Suzanne Cusick, “Musicology, Torture, Repair,” Radical Musicology 3 (2008), accessed 15 July 2025, http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Cusick.htm.
- Louis Barthas, Poilu: The War Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914–1918, ed. and trans. Edward M. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 383.
- Ralph Martin Jäger, “Janitscharenmusik,” in MGG Online (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016), accessed 17 July 2025, https://www.mgg-online.com/mgg/stable/533573; Nuri Özcan, “MEHTER مهتر,” in TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 28:545–49 (Ankara: TDV İslâm Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2003).
- Edmund A. Bowles, “The Impact of Turkish Military Bands on European Court Festivals in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Early Music 34, no. 4 (2006): 533–59; Okan Murat Öztürk, “Mehter Musikisi,” in Mehter, ed. Oğuz Elbaş (Ankara: Grafiker Yayıncılık, 2010), 239–307.
- Kaya Şahin, “Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 2 (2018): 463–92; A. Tül Demirbaş, “Sensing the Sultan’s Power: The Sound of the Mehter and Other Sensorial Elements in the 1582 Festival,” in Sounds of Power: Sonic Court Rituals In- and Outside Europe in the 15th–18th Centuries, ed. A. Tül Demirbaş and Margaret Scharrer (Cologne: Böhlau, 2024), 79–101.
- D. Linda Pearse, The Sonic Machine: Sound and Music in the Habsburg–Ottoman War (1593–1606), in progress.
- Olivier de La Marche, Mémoires d’Olivier de La Marche, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont, 4 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1882–88).
- Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy (London: Longman, 1973).
- Jean d’Auton, Chroniques de Louis XII, ed. René de Maulde La Clavière, 4 vols. (Paris: H. Laurens, 1889–95).
- Jehan Marot, Le voyage de Venise, ed. Giovanna Trisolini (Geneva: Droz, 1977).