No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2021
As Emma Hanna notes in the opening line of Sounds of War, ‘In parallel with studies of the poetry of the Great War, Britain’s musical history of the conflict has focused on a small group of elite composers’ (p. 1). Indeed, musical interest in the war has tended to focus on the likes of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth just as literary enquiry has traditionally centred on Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. However, as William Brooks, Christina Bashford and Gayle Magee write, ‘There are many stories that could be told [about the war], and the vast bulk of them concern ordinary people, not statesmen or generals or celebrated composers. To understand the war, surely, we need do no more than to give these voices a hearing.’1
1 Brooks, William, Bashford, Christina and Magee, Gayle, ‘Prelude: Beginnings’, Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I, ed. Brooks, , Bashford, and Magee, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 1–11 (p. 3)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See, for example, Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Grayzel, Susan R., Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1999)Google Scholar; Cohen, Deborah, Remapping the Homefront: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Nicoletta Gullace, ‘The Blood of our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Watson, Janet S. K., Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Meyer, Jessica, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Roper, Michael, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Maguire, Anna, ‘Colonial Encounters during the First World War: The Experience of Troops from New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London, 2016)Google Scholar; Landscapes and Voices of the Great War, ed. Angela K. Smith and Krista Cowman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Maguire, , ‘Transnational Lives: Colonial Life Writing and the First World War’, The Edinburgh Companion to World War I and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Das, Santanu, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Literature, Images, Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Fussell’s, Paul The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 2013)Google Scholar, while criticized for its focus on a select group of male, white war-poet veterans, introduced these ideas of memory as a valid point of enquiry into the war, thus being integral to the shift away from the war being understood just as military history. Also seminal in this area of cultural memory of the war has been the extensive output of Jay Winter, especially Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1990)Google Scholar; Gregory, Adrian, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (London: Bloomsbury, 1994)Google Scholar; Thomas Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, and Daniel Sherman, ‘Art Commerce and the Production of Memory in France after World War I’, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 150–67 and 186–211; Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998); Catherine Moriarty, ‘Review Article: The Material Culture of Great War Remembrance’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999), 653–62; Watson, , Fighting Different Wars Google Scholar; Wilson, Ross J., ‘The Trenches in British Popular Memory’, Interculture, 5 (2008), 109–18Google Scholar; Thacker, Toby, British Culture and the First World War: Experience, Representation and Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kelly, Alice, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
4 Examples of British-based large academic initiatives are five projects funded by the AHRC during the centenary years under the World War One Engagement Centre umbrella: Gateways to the First World War, University of Kent (<https://www.gatewaysfww.org.uk/>); Living Legacies, 1914–18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future, Queen’s University Belfast (<http://www.livinglegacies1914-18.ac.uk/>); Everyday Lives in War, University of Hertfordshire (<https://everydaylivesinwar.herts.ac.uk/>); the Centre for Hidden Histories: Community, Commemoration and the First World War, University of Nottingham (<http://hiddenhistorieswwi.ac.uk/>); and Voices of War and Peace, University of Birmingham (<https://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/>). The University of Leeds hosted two prominent research groups: Men, Women and Care, funded by the European Research Council and led by Jessica Meyer (<https://menwomenandcare.leeds.ac.uk/>), and Legacies of War, led by Alison Fell (https://legaciesofwar.leeds.ac.uk/).
5 See, for example, the series ‘Race, Empire and Colonial Troops’ published on the British Library’s website, featuring posts by Santanu Das, Richard Fogarty and others (<https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/themes/race-empire-and-colonial-troops>, accessed 8 October 2020); Susan Grayzel, ‘Women at Home in a World at War’ and ‘Changing Lives: Gender Expectations and Roles during and after World War One’, both also on the British Library website, <https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/women-at-home> and <https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/changing-lives-gender-expectations> (both accessed 8 October 2020); and Pankaj Mishra, ‘How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War’, The Guardian, 10 November 2017. However, some of the most visible projects to reach the public have tended to perpetuate the traditional white-washed and military-orientated view of the war that many academics have tried to revise. The 14–18 Now arts programme sponsored more than a hundred projects and art installations, among which were Peter Jackson’s 2018 They Shall Not Grow Old, a film that uses colourized and technologically transformed original archival footage from the fronts, and Jeremy Deller’s ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, a live, human memorial across Britain on 1 July 2016 to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Both have been criticized for their nearly sole focus on the white infantry soldier on the Western front and for not including colonial soldiers or women. See, for example, Alice Kelly, ‘They Shall Not Grow Old: World War I Film a Masterpiece of Skill and Artistry – Just Don’t Call It a Documentary’, The Conversation, 5 November 2018, <https://theconversation.com/they-shall-not-grow-old-world-war-i-film-a-masterpiece-of-skill-and-artistry-just-dont-call-it-a-documentary-105229> (accessed 20 November 2020). A similar critique could be made about Sam Mendes’s 2019 film 1917 (Dreamworks). For a full list and descriptions of 14–18 Now projects and their corporate and public sponsors (which ranged from the American and German embassies to NatWest), see <https://www.1418now.org.uk>.
6 Examples include Music and the Great War, ed. Deborah Kauffman, special issue, Journal of Musicological Research, 33/1–3 (2014); the Music of War, 1914–1918 conference at the British Library in August 2014; the pair of conferences Over Here and Over There at the University of York in February 2015, and 1915: Music, Memory and the Great War at the University of Illinois in March 2015, with the subsequent edited volume Over Here, Over There, ed. Brooks, Bashford and Magee; and the conference A ‘Great Divide’ or a Longer Nineteenth Century? Music, Britain, and the First World War at Durham University in January 2017, with the subsequent edited volume A Great Divide? Music, Britain and the First World War, ed. Michelle Meinhart (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming).
7 See, for example, Fuller, J. G., Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991; repr. 2006)Google Scholar; Sweeney, Regina M., Singing our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), chapters 5–7Google Scholar; Watkins, Glen, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 4; and Gier, Christina, Singing, Soldiering, and Sheet Music in America during the First World War (Lanham, KY: Lexington Books, 2016)Google Scholar. Much of my own work also deals with soldiers’ music-making, but on the home front in spaces of healing and convalescence. See Michelle Meinhart, ‘Memory and Private Mourning in an English Country House during the First World War: Lady Alda Hoare’s Musical Shrine to a Lost Son’, Music and the Great War, ed. Kauffman, 39–95; ‘Tommy Music Critics, an Unlikely Community, and The Longleat Lyre during World War I’, Over Here, Over There, ed. Brooks, Bashford and Magee, 127–48; ‘Soundscapes of Shell Shock in The Hydra: Journal of the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, 1916–18’, Music and Trauma in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Michelle Meinhart and Jillian Rogers, special issue, Nineteenth-Century Music Review (forthcoming); ‘Music, Work, and the First World War “Angel in the House”’, in A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart; and my monograph in progress Music, Memory, and Healing in the English Country House, 1914–1919. For a broader look at music in the British military leading up to the First World War, see Herbert, Trevor and Barlow, Helen, Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Meinhart, ‘Soundscapes of Shell Shock in The Hydra’.
9 See, for example, Vanessa Williams, ‘“Near to Reality, but Not Quite”: Lena Ashwell’s Concerts at the Front during the First World War’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 23 (2019), 188–211; and Michelle Meinhart, ‘Music, Work, and the First World War “Angel in the House”’ and ‘A “Cosy Corner Chat” about Opera: Fashioning New Femininities in The Gentlewoman and The Lady Magazines, 1885–1914’, Opera and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Alison Mero and Christina Fuhrmann (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), particularly (in the latter article) the section ‘Musical Philanthropy, the New Femininity, and the Decline of Opera’.
10 Mullen, John, The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain during the First World War, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015 Google Scholar; London and New York: Routledge, 2016); originally published as ‘The Show Must Go On!’ La chanson populaire en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).
11 Gier, Singing, Soldiering, and Sheet Music.
12 Simon, Anne, Chanter la Grande Guerre: Les poilus et les femmes (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2014)Google Scholar; Bourke, Chris, Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
13 See Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture; Sweeney, Singing our Way to Victory; Watkins, Proof through the Night, chapters 4 and 14; and Meinhart, ‘Memory and Private Mourning’, ‘Tommy Music Critics’ and Music, Memory, and Healing in the English Country House, chapter 3.
14 Rottgeri here presents little of his own research, as he admits; rather, he summarizes the linguist Reinhard Olt’s Ph.D. dissertation, published in 1981, which categorizes songs according to their lyrics, such as ‘patriotic’, ‘goodbye’, ‘weapon’ and ‘fighting’.
15 Saylor, Eric, English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapters 1 and 3; Matthew Riley, ‘Landscape and Commemoration in British Art Music, 1898–1926: Continuity and Contexts’, A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart.
16 Vanessa Williams, ‘“Welded in a Single Mass”: Memory and Community in London’s Concert Halls during the First World War’, Music and the Great War, ed. Kauffman, 27–38; Jane Angell, ‘Art Music and British Public Discourse during the First World War’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Royal Holloway University of London, 2014); and Angell, ‘Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards: London Conservatoire Life during the First World War’, A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart.
17 Rachel Cowgill, ‘Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7’, Literature and Music of the First World War, ed. Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate, special issue, First World War Studies, 2/1 (2011), 75–107; Kate Kennedy, ‘Silence Recalled in Sound: British Classical Music and the Armistice’, The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice, ed. Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 211–34; Kennedy, ‘“A Music of Grief”: Classical Music and the First World War’, The Great War, special issue, International Affairs, 90/2 (2014), 379–95; Christina Bashford, ‘Medium and Message: Frank Bridge’s Lament for String Orchestra and the Sinking of the Lusitania (1915)’, Over Here, Over There, ed. Brooks, Bashford and Magee, 15–36; and three articles in A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart: Jonathan Clinch, ‘Death, Memory and Cultural Dynamic in an English Elegy’; Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Disruption or Continuity? Elgar’s Cello Concerto and the Modern Romantic Ideal’; and Christopher Scheer, ‘“Come Lovely and Soothing Death”: Unity and Regeneration in the Wartime Music of Gustav Holst’.
18 See, for example, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Charles McGuire, ‘Edward Elgar: “Modern” or “Modernist?”’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 8–38; Harper-Scott, , The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Sarah, Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)Google Scholar; and Kate Bowan, ‘British “Internationalmindedness” and the Early Years of the International Society for Contemporary Music’, and Jennifer Oates, ‘Musical Maverick: Granville Bantock, Modernism, and the First World War’, both in A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart.
19 Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning.
20 Fulcher, Jane F., The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
21 Duchesneau, Michel, L’avant-garde musicale et ses sociétés à Paris de 1871 à 1939 (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1997)Google Scholar; Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Outside Ravel’s Tomb’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 465–530 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fulcher, , The Composer as Intellectual Google Scholar; Brooks, Jeanice, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future between the Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, Barbara, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Kelly, , ‘Reflecting the Public Appetite in Text and Music: Debussy’s Act of Wartime Propaganda’, Over Here, Over There, ed. Brooks, Bashford and Magee, 58–72 Google Scholar; Levitz, Tamara, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levitz, , ‘Who Owns Mavra? A Transnational Dispute’, Stravinsky and his World, ed. Levitz, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 21–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pasler, Jann, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Cvetkovich, Ann, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
23 Rogers uses this approach elsewhere to offer new interpretations of the role of mourning and trauma in Ravel’s wartime and post-war compositions. See Jillian C. Rogers, ‘Musical “Magic Words”: Tracing Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La valse’, Music and Trauma in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Meinhart and Rogers.
24 Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992)Google Scholar; Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (London: Penguin Books, 2015)Google Scholar.
25 Root, Maria P., ‘Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality’, Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, ed. Brown, Laura S. and Ballou, Mary B. (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 229–65Google Scholar.
26 DeNora, Tia, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Levine, Peter A., Healing Trauma: Restoring the Wisdom of the Body (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 1999)Google Scholar; Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.
28 Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), 152; Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 192–4; Deborah Mawer, ‘Musical Objects and Machines’, The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47–67; Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, rev. edn, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), iv: Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 59–129, 477–94, 561–98; Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 143, 174–5.
29 I thank Sarah Collins for suggesting this point.
30 For more on the history of soldiers and trauma, see Herman, , Trauma and Recovery; Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Leese, Peter, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lerner, Paul, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Thomas, Gregory, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914–1940 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Crouthamel, Jason, The Great War and German Memory: Society, Politics, and Psychological Trauma, 1914–1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Fiona, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30 (London: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar; Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War, ed. Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Reid, , Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 For more on the history of music therapy, see Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 127–34. For an overview of ways in which music therapy is used with traumatized soldiers today, see Hannah Bronson, Rebecca Vaudreuil and Joke Bradt, ‘Music Therapy Treatment of Active Duty Military: An Overview of Intensive Outpatient and Longitudinal Care Programs’, Music Therapy Perspectives, 36/2 (2018), 195–206, <https://doi.org/10.1093/mtp/miy006> (accessed 2 October 2020). For examples of ways in which soldiers in recent times have used music in the combat zones, see J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For an example of how the US military has used music in interrogation procedures and internment camps, see Suzanne Cusick, ‘“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, 2/1 (2008), 1–26.
32 Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
33 Richards, Jeffrey, Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Emma Hanna, ‘Musical Entertainment and the British Empire, 1914–1918’, The Great War and the British Empire, ed. Andrekos Varnava and Michael Walsh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 63–80; Anna Maguire, ‘“Home Sweet Home”: Music and Identity for Colonial Troops during the First World War’, A Great Divide?, ed. Meinhart. For another example of music from this perspective of empire, see Andrew Harrison, ‘Sounds from the Trenches: Australian Composers and the Great War’, The Great War and the British Empire, ed. Varnava and Walsh, 265–78.
34 Frogley, Alain, ‘Review Article: Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 241–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.