Theorizing Trauma and Music in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Investigations of how people have used music to represent, perform, enact and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade, although these have often focused on post-World War II musicians and musical phenomena. This work has engaged various methodologies and drawn on myriad bodies of trauma theory in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for Holocaust survivors, Cold War- and glasnost-era Eastern European musicians and civilians and soldiers in Iraq. However, despite the growing interest in trauma within music scholarship, scant attention has been paid to relationships between musical phenomena and trauma prior to World War II. And yet, the wars, revolutions, forced displacement, slavery and imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make these years some of the most violent in the histories of modern Europe and the Americas, and thus some of the most important to address when asking questions regarding relationships between music and trauma.

In this special issue's introductory essay, we consider why pre-twentieth century musicians and repertoires have historically not been addressed in scholarly literature. In so doing, we outline the aims of the issue; review relevant literature in musicology and trauma studies; discuss the benefits and challenges of applying trauma theory to nineteenth-century music and musicians and provide readers with information on this special issue's collaborative history. Although giving readers a fleshed-out overview of trauma studies from the nineteenth century to present is outside the scope of this article, this introduction nevertheless provides enough background on the status and main ideas of trauma research from the mid-nineteenth century to present day to facilitate comprehension of how the research showcased in this special issue relates to social, historical and political conceptions of trauma.

Madame Talma, wife of the celebrated actor, was confined in the prison with Madame Roland. She [Madame Talma] says, ‘She [Madame Roland] behaved with great heroism on her way to the scaffold, but the evening before, she was uncommonly agitated. She spent the night in playing on the harpsichord; but the air she struck, and her manner of playing, were so strange, so shocking, and so frightful, that the sounds will never escape my memory.’¹

Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.²

It is the voice, and it is the music

that links the Present with the Past,

not the pierced heart and wounded side.³

As the quotations above demonstrate, trauma, music and sound have long been inextricably intertwined in people's experiences of oppression and violence, as well as in the aftermath of such experiences. In some instances, as Frederick Douglass articulated, music contributed to traumatic experience in such a way that hearing the strains of song once heard in strife could revive the memories and emotions of an initial trauma. In the wake of trauma, music and sound can act as powerful mediators not only between past and present – as the case books from the Holloway Sanatorium and Maria Child's memoirs suggest – but also between traumatized people seeking connections with others. These are just three examples, but there are countless others: in literature, connections between sound and trauma abound, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Edgar Allan Poe to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.⁴ A handful of scholars have addressed music and violence, mourning or mental illness in instrumental works of the long nineteenth century, for instance in Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony.⁵ In recent years music scholars have also pointed out similar representations in opera, including in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni, Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.⁶ And yet, trauma studies has remained a little utilized lens for understanding these and other nineteenth-century musical representations of traumatic events and psychological suffering.

Mark Micale has called hysteria ‘among the oldest described disorders in the history of medicine’.⁷ Similarly, the sociologist Allan Young points out that ‘as far back as we know, people have been tormented by memories that filled them with feelings of sadness and remorse, the sense of irreparable loss, and sensations of fright and horror’. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that the concept of trauma – ‘a new kind of painful memory’ – was defined and developed in ways that we still recognize today. As Young explains, ‘It was unlike the memories of earlier times in that it originated in a previously unidentified psychological state, called “traumatic”, and was linked to previously unknown kinds of forgetting, called “repression” and “dissociation”’.⁸ This nineteenth-century notion of trauma would eventually form the basis for the complex idea of post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD) in the late twentieth century.

Investigations of how people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have used music and sound to represent, perform and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade. Music scholars have drawn upon various methodologies in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for a variety of people, including but not limited to Holocaust survivors, Cold War- and glasnost-era Eastern European musicians, and civilians and soldiers in Iraq.⁹ However, despite the growing interest in trauma within music scholarship, music scholars have paid scant attention to relationships between musical phenomena and trauma prior to World War II, even though the wars, revolutions, displacement, slavery and colonialism of the long nineteenth century place these years amongst the most violent in global history. Moreover, many of the concepts and practices associated with the development of psychology as a discipline in the twentieth century are rooted in nineteenth-century thought. Thus, the nineteenth century is among the most important eras to address when considering music and sound in relation to trauma.

This special issue examines how people in multiple wartime cultures between 1845 and 1920 used music and sound to articulate, cope with and, in some cases, produce trauma. We take as our focus music-making during wars of the long nineteenth century in the United States and France, as well as Britain and its empire. This concentration permits us to demonstrate the different and also sometimes similar ways in which traumatic experience inspired and was communicated through music, or through discourse on sound and music. Our focus on the United States, France and Britain emerged not only because we happen to work on repertoires and figures in these locations, but also from our desire to spotlight regions with complicated histories of conflict and colonial violence. These regions evidence myriad ways in which trauma was inflicted and experienced, and they exhibit how traumatic events shaped and were shaped by ideas of country, gender, race, class and sexuality. Focusing on music and sound in these locations allows us to establish significant, in-depth connections between traumatic discourse, sonic experience and musical performance.

Our concentration on 1840 to 1920 is also especially significant, given that this is the precise time period in which trauma – then called railway spine, hystérie or hysteria, amongst other terms – developed and solidified as a medical diagnosis and socio-cultural phenomenon, primarily in Europe and the United States.¹⁰ In fact, our close examination of ways in which violent experiences left imprints on minds and bodies in this period reveals how music and sound were foundational to concepts of trauma as they developed into and then throughout the twentieth century. Thus, this journal issue foregrounds sound and music as media central to understanding the cultural forces that shaped the development of trauma as a concept. In so doing, we draw attention to the importance of music for historians of psychology, as well as to the substantial role that trauma has played in musical life in the long nineteenth century.

All the articles in this issue deal with war – a topic rife for the application of trauma theory. While musicologists have long explored relationships between music, sound and war, very few studies have drawn upon trauma theory. Moreover, authors here offer watershed works that address conflicts rarely considered in musicological research, including the Mexican–American, South African and Franco-Prussian Wars that Elizabeth Morgan, Erin Johnson-Williams and Erin Brooks examine, respectively. Musicological interest in the American Civil War and First World War is more plentiful, but this work nevertheless – with the exception of Sarah Gerk's, Jillian Rogers's and Michelle Meinhart's articles and book projects – has not focused on the trauma of these conflicts.¹¹ Gerk's focus on Irish famine immigrants and their descendants during the Civil War is therefore uncharted territory for music studies. Moreover, Michelle Meinhart's piece breaks new ground in its focus on music in a war hospital – particularly one that specialized in treating shell shock – and Rogers's article follows in the tradition of examining a well-known composer's response to war and the death of loved ones; though her use of theories of mourning and trauma she presents a new perspective from which to understand Ravel's compositional aims and processes.

The articles in this journal issue push back against received music-historical narratives of the long nineteenth century, investigating how people's emotional lives influenced and were influenced by the political ideologies, armed conflict and forced incarcerations of numerous wars, as well as the sonic experiences and musical practices that these events and ideologies engendered. In this way, each of the contributors speaks to one of the central aims of this special issue: to explore how theories of trauma that have emerged in the last 150 years might be used to analyse repertoires and musical practices of the long nineteenth century. This journal issue sheds new light on the meaning of music and musical practices specifically in the contexts of war, while also articulating significant new frameworks for employing trauma theory in historical studies of music and sound. All of the authors in this special issue use a ground-up approach in engaging with recent discourse on trauma within numerous fields. After consulting historical sources, each author considered which theoretical conceptions of trauma might help to explain the social and musical phenomena she encountered. As a result, no single theoretical conception of trauma dominates within this issue. Instead, authors have utilized myriad conceptions of trauma from psychology, psychoanalytic theory, history, sociology and musicology.

In ‘Music Making as Witness in the Mexican-American War: Testimony, Embodiment and Trauma’, Morgan demonstrates how the popular piano music published during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) narrated the war's events from various different political perspectives. She argues that this sheet music's depictions of traumatic events of war – from charging on the battlefield to suffering physical pain after an injury – gave performers at home opportunities to simulate those events and imagine vividly the experiences of those on the front lines of the conflict. By paying attention to the corporeal experience of the pianist in performing these pieces – a methodology inspired by Maria Cizmic's and Jillian Rogers's work on music and trauma – Morgan concludes that these compositions provided significant pain-centred counternarratives to the politically charged media accounts of the war that framed it as a form of anesthetized and worthwhile violence.¹²

Gerk's essay – ‘Songs of Famine and War: Irish Famine Memory in the Music of the US Civil War’ – interrogates music as a particularly useful site for expressing famine memory during the US Civil War (1861–1865). By reviewing accounts from the Civil War diaries of Irish-born soldiers, she shows that silence persisted about the famine, with few people directly connecting the memories of famine with wartime experience. However, by exploring popular songs from the Civil War, Gerk shows that Irish famine trauma deeply shaped the musical and emotional lives of nineteenth-century Americans. Utilizing several case studies that include the popular Civil War-Era song ‘Kathleen Marvourneen’ and bandleader Patrick Gilmore, Gerk addresses several ways that the grief, displacement and suffering of Irish immigrants shaped musical life of the US Civil War. Similarly, contemporary sheet music reveals that some tropes from the famine, such as starvation and displacement, retained popularity during the Civil War. By viewing her archival sources through trauma studies frameworks provided by Cathy Caruth, Jeffrey Alexander, Melanie Duckworth, Victoria Folette and others, Gerk's essay reveals that music permitted emotional expression without reliance on verbalization or narrative, allowing song to be employed as an important mechanism for coping with not only the Irish famine trauma but also the US Civil War.¹³

Brooks examines the role of sound in the production of cultural trauma in Paris during the Commune in ‘Sonic Scars in Urban Space: Trauma and the Parisian Soundscape during l'année terrible’. Brooks offers a new, sonically oriented reading of the siege of Paris and the Commune (1870–1871) that parses rich interconnections between sound, urban space, trauma and memory. Drawing upon memoirs, siege journals, press coverage and archival materials, she analyses these nineteenth-century cataclysms via sound studies, cultural memory and trauma studies. Drawing on the work of Andreas Huyssen and other scholars who have studied traumatic urban scars as commemorative sites in postmodern cities, Brooks shows that examining the sonic dimensions of violence reveals the extent to which the Franco-Prussian war forged similarly fraught Parisian places, such as the mur des Fédéres and the ruins of the Tuileries.¹⁴ In addition, Brooks engages with Jeffrey Alexander's work on cultural trauma in order to consider connections between trauma, collective identity and urban community, ultimately demonstrating how elements of contemporary theory regarding trauma, war and memory can productively inform our understandings of earlier conflicts. Moreover, Brooks intervenes in scholarship on the history of psychology by reframing Jean-Martin Charcot's theories of hysteria as intimately intertwined with the specifically sonic violence and traumatic aftereffects of the Paris Commune.

In ‘“The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches”: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War, 1899–1902’, Johnson-Williams investigates the role of the concertina in constructing and remembering suffering during and after the South African War (1899–1902). Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphized concertina – in the British press and in accounts of life in concentration camps during the South African War, Johnson-Williams situates the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, particularly Vamik Volkon's concept of ‘perennial mourning’.¹⁵ Ultimately, she proposes that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering. She points out that Afrikaner populations’ physical suffering – both because of and constructed in British imperial discourse – has continued to shape Afrikaner nationalist music making, particularly the continual use of the concertina as a complex sonic signifier of a traumatic colonial past.

In ‘“Unearthly Music”, “Howling Idiots” and “Orgies of Amusement”: The Soundscape of Shell Shock at Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital, 1917–18’, Michelle Meinhart examines music's use in therapy for shell-shocked officers convalescing at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh during World War I. Drawing on concepts of testimony from trauma studies, she argues that music's role in The Hydra, Craiglockhart's in-house magazine, reflects the two approaches to shell shock treatment employed at the hospital. Reviews in the magazine's weekly column ‘Concerts’ point not only to the ‘cure by functioning’ approach promoted by Captain Arthur Brock, which included singing, playing instruments and listening, but also to literary narratives that reference music in ways that reflect the Freudian psychotherapy used by Dr W.H.R. Rivers, in which dreams and memories were explored, discussed and narrated, rather than repressed. In discussing both of these types of treatments at the hospital, she draws upon theories of Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Bessel van der Kolk in order to show how music's curative properties lay in its visceral ability to physically move the body and mind.¹⁶ Finally, applying Kai Erikson's and Alexander's theorizations of collective trauma, Meinhart shows that The Hydra's testimonies reveal shared cultural trauma amongst the men in the hospital. These intersections of music with representations of shell shock, class and masculinity, she argues, became central to the cultural memory of the war in Britain.¹⁷

In ‘Musical “Magic Words”: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse’, Rogers argues that Ravel's post-war compositions can be understood as musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and to his mother's death. She places primary and archival sources, such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers, in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, Rogers reads Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their traumatic experiences.¹⁸ By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, she ultimately argues that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.

In the remainder of this special issue's introduction, we address several intertwining histories that serve as important backdrops for the articles that follow. First, we provide a brief overview of trauma as a cultural and medical concept, from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century to present day. Since numerous historians of psychiatry and psychology have already outlined this history – and several of the authors in this issue address various aspects of it – we focus on presenting readers who may be unfamiliar with this history with the basic historical context for engaging with the research presented in this journal issue. Next, we address numerous challenges that arise when studying pre-twentieth century intersections between music, sound and trauma, informing our readers of some of the methodological quandaries and limitations that musicologists working on trauma encounter, while also providing information on how these challenges might be navigated. In the process, we demonstrate why the study of music and sound in relation to trauma in the long nineteenth century might be significant and beneficial for historians, musicologists, historical ethnomusicologists and sound studies scholars alike. Finally, as we bring this introduction to a close, we discuss the importance of collectivity and collaboration in the creation of this special issue. In so doing, we parallel Judith Herman's and Kai Erikson's acknowledgement of the important role that community plays in addressing cultures of trauma in the past and the present.¹⁹

Historicizing ‘Trauma’

Identifying the various nineteenth-century conceptions of trauma and understanding how these changed over the course of the century is central to historically situating the articles in this special issue. Around the middle of the nineteenth-century, trauma-related conditions such as railway spine and neurasthenia prompted physiological and psychological inquiry into these conditions’ effects and causes.²⁰ Doctors tended to understand these illnesses as somatically based, rather than as psychological illnesses. In the latter part of the century, however, Parisian experimental psychologists and neurologists such as Charcot and his student Janet conducted ground-breaking work on the psychological foundations of trauma, which they termed hystérie – or hysteria.²¹ Janet's work, which combined neurological, psychological and physiological considerations, differed from that of Charcot in part through his lack of interest in public displays of hysteria. But his work portended a more significant contribution to current-day psychology through his development of the idée fixe – a ‘fixed idea’ or traumatic memory that became stuck in the minds of people who had experienced traumatic events that overwhelmed their emotions – as well as his advocacy of talk therapy as a means to help people process traumatic memories.²² Freud, another student of Charcot, is similarly significant in the history of psychological responses to traumatic experiences. Freud established the multi-levelled nature of consciousness and emphasized the interpretation of dreams and articulation of unconscious desires in his patients. In addition, he posed extensive inquiry into hysteria, focusing largely on female patients until the interwar period, when he began to consider the ‘compulsion to repeat’ in children and soldiers.²³

As trauma studies scholars such as Micale, Young, Elaine Showalter and Van Der Kolk have shown, hysteria and trauma were largely considered to be feminine ailments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁴ This construction of trauma as feminine persisted despite the facts that 1) men throughout history have exhibited symptoms of traumatic experience; 2) Charcot diagnosed ‘hysteria’ in men at his practice; and 3) a growing number of men in Britain in the 1890s were recognized as being afflicted by ‘nerves’.²⁵ In part, this gendered understanding of trauma was due to the large number of women who sought (or who were forced into) treatment for depression, ‘hysteria’ and other mental illnesses in the nineteenth century, leading many psychologists to associate femininity with madness, irrationality and emotionality, often without considering the negative effects of the misogynistic social circumstances in which these women lived.²⁶ Freud offers an extreme example of psychologists’ disavowal of the violence of women's everyday lives: around the turn to the twentieth century, after noticing over previous decades how frequently young female patients recounted sexual abuse, he denied the truthfulness of his female patients’ widespread accounts of sexual abuse. He attributed their testimonies to women's unconscious sexual desires, rather than to their real-life experiences of sexual violence.²⁷ Indeed, this gendering of trauma, especially at a time when femininity was aligned with weakness, led to widespread silencing of traumatic experiences, not only by women and men who had experienced difficult life events, but also from the psychologists who treated them.

Nineteenth-century trauma discourse intersects with discourses of degeneracy, class, homosexuality, disability, nationality, biology and race, making understanding contemporary conceptions of trauma important not only in the history of psychology, but also within larger social, cultural and artistic histories of the nineteenth century. Traumatic symptoms were pathologized, much in the same way – and often via evolutionary thought – as many other social identities were at the time.²⁸ These conceptions of trauma, race, homosexuality, class and disability were shaped by patriarchal structures that constructed people of non-dominant populations – non-white people, women, people who expressed same-sex desire, people of the working classes and disabled people, among others – as requiring containment and protection within urban, industrial and capitalist nation states, often within larger empires. The essays in this issue foreground and carefully address these relationships. Both Johnson-Williams and Meinhart consider how hegemonic patriarchal class structures shaped understandings of trauma within imperial Britain, while Rogers investigates how masculinity shaped traumatic expressions in World War I-Era France. In addition, Morgan explores the gendered nature of the piano parlour music that conveyed trauma during the Mexican–American War.

The labelling of trauma as an identifiable condition in the second half of the nineteenth century was also bound up with concerns about modernity and its attendant changes in notions of selfhood and memory. As Young has underlined, the discovery of trauma as a diagnosable condition, as a recognizable malady that can be treated clinically, ‘revised the scope of two core attributes of the Western self, free will and self-knowledge – the capacity to reflect upon and to attempt to put into action one's desires, preferences, and intentions’.²⁹ Thus, in this formulation, the ‘discovery’ of trauma was fundamental to the fashioning of notions of the modern self.

The First World War continued to further relationships between trauma, memory and the emergence of a modern sense of self, as Paul Fussell noted in his landmark study of the conflict.³⁰ The mass violence that World War I brought to millions of soldiers and civilians across the globe prompted new inquiry into the causes and symptoms of trauma. In many ways these investigations built upon and in some instances revised nineteenth-century conceptions of trauma. Neurologists and physicians in Britain and France developed conceptions of military trauma that they referred to by a host of different names, with ‘shell shock’, commotion, and névroses de guerre chief among these. Although names and definitions of war-related psychological conditions varied enormously within and across national boundaries, many scientists and physicians sought the answer to the question of what caused war neuroses: was it the underlying cause physical injury, hereditary predisposition, a lack of courage on the part of soldiers, or some combination of all of these?³¹ Many people remained silent about the effects that the war's violence had on their lives due to the economic and social disadvantages that came with confessing to having been traumatized.³² Nevertheless, the intense grief felt by individuals, communities and nations led to cultures of mass mourning, remembrance and memorialization; moreover, the losses and traumas of World War I set the stage for the establishment of the PTSD diagnoses of the late twentieth century.³³

Although discussions and diagnoses of trauma waned in many public and private arenas after World War I, World War II engendered a new wave of research into the traumatic effects of war, violence and incarceration. Abram Kardiner published the ‘first systematic account of the symptomatology and psychodynamics of the war neuroses’ in 1941 in the United States.³⁴ For Kardiner, traumatic symptoms were the result of people adapting to stressful, overwhelming situations.³⁵ Although Kardiner's text was useful during World War II, it had been based on accounts and evidence Kardiner had collected during the 1920s in response to World War I's events. In the 1940s and 1950s, Roy Grinker and John Spiegel, as well as the Veterans Administration, published reports that detailed war-related traumatic symptoms.³⁶ These clinical studies reframed trauma as something that could happen to anyone if they were placed in continuously violent situations, and recommended a variety of treatments for traumatized patients, including talk therapy, rest and certain drug regimes involving sodium pentothal and sodium amytal – both known colloquially under the heading ‘truth serum’ – which were used to induce hypnotic, memory-recalling states.³⁷ The years during and just after World War II also coincided with the first globally widespread, institutionalized uses of music as a therapeutic tool, although music therapy was and has continued to be downplayed within psychological discourse.³⁸ World War II also spurred the development of the field of Holocaust Studies, which in many ways has served as the foundation of current-day trauma studies. Although memoirs and other literature related to the Holocaust began to emerge in the public sphere in the 1940s and 1950s, it was not until the 1980s that increased scholarly interest in the Holocaust would set the stage for Holocaust Studies to develop into the full-fledged academic discipline that it is today.³⁹ Holocaust Studies and trauma studies only came to the fore as widespread interdisciplinary fields of research in the wake of the first definition of PTSD in the American Psychological Association's third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980.

The appearance of the first official definition of PTSD in the DSM-III was a watershed moment in the study of trauma for psychologists, survivors and researchers in the humanities and social sciences. This definition and its revision in 1987 have shaped and been shaped by understandings of and debates about trauma in all of these fields for the last 40 years. Initially explored in relation to Vietnam War veterans, PTSD has been since expanded to include victims of sexual and domestic violence, as well ‘secondary’ victims, such as rescue workers, bystanders and relatives of traumatized people. Even more broadly, the DSM-III and the DSM-IIIR describe traumatic events as those that occur ‘outside the range of usual human experience’, and in the case of the fourth edition (DSM-IV), as posing ‘actual or threatened death of serious injury, or other threat to one's physical integrity’.⁴⁰ Indeed, many psychologists, including Herman, have long defined trauma as being an exceptional event that defies understanding, rather than understanding trauma as involving kinds of violence that people unfortunately live with. However, more recently, as psychologists Laura Brown and Maria P. Root, as well as cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich have pointed out, much in modern life can be traumatizing that falls within ‘the range of usual human experience’, particularly for vulnerable populations.⁴¹ Many people face ongoing, everyday experiences of violence that underline that trauma can emerge over time, rather than in a singular moment. Taken together, these everyday experiences – which can include poverty, microaggressions, long-term physical, emotional or verbal abuse, and fear of rape, assault or violence – constitute what Root and Brown have termed ‘insidious trauma’.⁴² This idea of trauma as socially based rather than an individual, psychological affliction has become an especially significant means for humanities scholars to consider how trauma is and has been constructed in various ways and for various people throughout history.

In recent decades humanists, social scientists and psychologists have become increasingly invested in examining what has been termed cultural trauma.⁴³ Sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman, and numerous cultural theorists, have considered the formations, ramifications and representations of trauma among a wide range of communities, from African Americans, Asian Americans and other minorities to Holocaust survivors and their children.⁴⁴ Alexander argues that cultural trauma does not necessarily arise when something happens to a community, but rather is the result of how communities narrate, represent and remember events or occurrences.⁴⁵ Investigations of cultural trauma have dovetailed with considerations of intergenerational and transgenerational trauma – or what Marianne Hirsch has termed ‘postmemory’ – in which the children or grandchildren of people who have experienced individual or cultural trauma demonstrate symptoms of their forebears’ traumas; for some trauma theorists the transmission of trauma is physiological and epigenetic, while for others it is psychological and/or socio-cultural.⁴⁶

In order to address cultural traumas in nuanced, intersectional ways, perspectives from feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism and queer theory have been especially helpful in addressing how collectives narrativize, memorialize, perform and disidentify with traumatic events as well as the everyday traumas of widespread discrimination, harassment, abuse and systemic violence. As Cvetkovich explains, such resources ‘have been necessary in order to do justice to a series of cases that never seem to quite measure up to expectations that trauma be catastrophic and extreme’.⁴⁷ Moreover, as cultural trauma has become an increasingly rich and interdisciplinary field of study in the humanities and social sciences, numerous scholars have called for a reckoning with the Eurocentrism of trauma studies by interrogating how trauma is manifested and represented in postcolonial and global frameworks.⁴⁸ In addition, scholars on both sides of what has often been perceived as a clinical versus humanities-based divide in approaches to trauma studies have been exploring means of traversing disciplinary boundaries.⁴⁹ The influence of cultural trauma discourse is evident in this special issue: our authors have taken broad and varied approaches to understanding trauma from a combination of psychological, somatic and cultural approaches to traumatic experience, depending on what the particular historical situation under consideration calls for. Although many of the essays centre on music and trauma amidst white European and American populations, Johnson-Williams addresses trauma in South African contexts, and almost all of our authors address how gender, class and race – amongst other social considerations such as disability and sexuality – played a role in musical, sonic and traumatic experiences.

In the past three decades, historians, cultural theorists, music scholars, literary theorists and film and media scholars have applied concepts from trauma studies to explore history and memory, narrative and its limits, memorialization and cultural representations and genealogies of trauma.⁵⁰ With the emergence of Holocaust Studies in the 1990s and 2000s came an emphasis on testimony as the therapeutic process of narrativizing or putting one's traumatic experience into words, and having someone bear witness to those words.⁵¹ Literary critics Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, as well as psychologist Dori Laub and historian Dominick LaCapra, brought issues of testimony to bear on their analyses of literature and history, underlining the ways in which testimony must be accounted for, even as it problematizes and upends straightforward historical and literary narratives.⁵² Testimony remains a significant avenue of research for scholars today, as evidenced in recent musicological investigations of trauma by Wlodarski and Daughtry, as well as the majority of the authors of this special issue's essays.⁵³

This emphasis on testimony has led to a particular interest within the humanities and social sciences in the ways in which media, literature, film, music and art provide or lack representational narrative frameworks for the expression of trauma. Much of this work has focused explicitly on post-World War II media, taking a particular interest in what some scholars have called ‘trauma culture’ and others ‘trauma aesthetics’.⁵⁴ Indeed, in our current moment, trauma would seem to be everywhere, particularly in Anglo-American media – from articles in newspapers and magazines to podcasts, newscasts, films and television shows.⁵⁵ Language and terminology from trauma studies permeates much of the work of the artists and journalists who create contemporary media. For example, inter-generational trauma and epigenetics have received much attention in recent mainstream media,⁵⁶ as have the more established topics of PTSD and resiliency among veterans⁵⁷ and innovations in therapy and treatment for survivors of PTSD and sexual assault.⁵⁸ The reticence or inability to voice trauma in words as noted throughout the history of trauma, however, did not always translate into complete silence. Today's popular interest in trauma has been extended to the role of arts in recovery.⁵⁹ Specifically, regarding music, survivors of trauma have reflected on the role of individual songs or pieces of music, as well as the physical act of making music, in their recovery process.⁶⁰ Music therapy as a discipline thrives in many places throughout the world, and despite lack of funding and support in nationalized and privatized healthcare systems, some advances are being made, for instance in trials underway in the UK's Nation Health Service.⁶¹

As the above paragraphs suggest, the fields of disability studies and trauma studies overlap but also differ in several important ways. Scholars in disability studies and trauma studies are all interested in the ways in which impairment of all kinds – including but not limited to mental illness and emotional distress – have been and continue to be socio-culturally constructed and represented. In both fields, scholars engage with, employ and critique both medical-scientific and socio-cultural models of understanding how various kinds of impairment and the ways these have been constructed affect people's experiences in the world. However, whereas disability studies scholars address trauma as one type of disability, scholars in trauma studies focus more explicitly on how people experience, express, construct and cope with traumatic experiences and symptoms. Moreover, the critique within disability studies of medical models that aim to ‘fix’ or ‘cure’ various kinds of impairments has had a series of complicated responses within trauma studies since trauma is often the result of various kinds of systemic and personal violence that trauma scholars critique and often argue (and rightly so) can and should be prevented via more ethical actions and policies.⁶² Because trauma is often passed from generation to generation, and because traumatized people often traumatize others – whether consciously or not – trauma scholars understand trauma as a condition that, in an ideal world, would be processed and coped with in ways that would not only help those who experience traumatic symptoms, but also prevent future traumas from occurring. Nevertheless, trauma studies has been influenced by disability scholars’ resistance to narratives of ‘overcoming’ and ‘fixing’, which is particularly apparent in the work of Cvetkovich, Rogers and numerous cultural historians of the AIDS crisis in the United States, all of whom suggest that people sometimes avoid resolving traumatic symptoms for a whole range of personal, political and ethical reasons.⁶³ Ultimately, however, both fields seek to create more social awareness around disability and trauma, while also advocating for more ethical representations of, as well as rights and policies for, people with disabilities and those living with trauma and other related mental illnesses.

In the last 15 years, musicologists who study post-World War II cultures have been especially keen to explore relationships between music and violence, often utilizing methodologies drawn from the range of approaches to studying trauma that have materialized in multiple disciplines since the 1980s. With a series of articles published in the first two decades of the twenty-first century on music as a means of torture in Guatanamo Bay and other US military-backed prisons, Suzanne Cusick emerged at the vanguard of musicological research that has attended to music and violence, as well as music and incarceration, both of which have informed how musicologists and ethnomusicologists have addressed issues of music and violence since then.⁶⁴ In 2012, Maria Cizmic published Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe – the first music research monograph to consider music and trauma – which investigates how music provided people in late socialist Eastern Europe with opportunities to perform, express, represent, testify and bear witness to the traumas of the Stalinist era and World War II.⁶⁵ Three years later, Wlodarski and Daughtry published texts that address, respectively, how music has borne witness to the Holocaust and how US soldiers and Iraqi civilians understood music and sound as tools of both the creation and the processing of trauma during the Iraq War.⁶⁶ In addition, music scholars such as Eric Hung, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Fred Maus, Joshua Pilzer, Nicholas Reyland, Martha Sprigge and Patrick Zuk have made significant contributions to literature that examines how trauma has manifested in an array of musical media in myriad cultural contexts – from Japanese Americans’ music-theatrical responses to internment and Germans’ church music performance after the bombing of Dresden during World War II, to music in television programmes on trauma and North American and British musicians’ responses to sexually- and sexuality-based trauma in and after the 1980s.⁶⁷

However, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers, performers and listeners also understood music as an important medium through which trauma could be articulated, whether through sound or through meaningful silences. As many scholars have noted, music's nearly infinite interpretability has historically made it a medium par excellence for self-expression or communicating with others with a certain amount of plausible deniability, especially in historical moments and cultural realities when these activities might otherwise lead to social censure, arrest and imprisonment or even death.⁶⁸ With this in mind, the authors whose work appears in this special issue ask and answer questions about the various ways in which music and sound were meaningful media for coping with the long-lasting effects of violence, articulating individual and collective trauma and the development of trauma as a concept in the long nineteenth century.

The Challenges of Studying Music and Trauma Before World War II

Musicologists focusing on post-World War II repertoires have generally been more willing than scholars studying earlier periods to bring trauma theory into their scholarship. As noted in the previous section, scholars in Holocaust Studies and those interested in PTSD after the Vietnam War have offered a plethora of illuminating approaches for repertoires of and after the Second World War. In addition, scholars studying trauma for post-1939 musicians and repertoires have often been able to speak with composers, listeners and performers who experienced trauma, since many of these people are still living. Historians of post-1939 musical cultures have also benefited from the entry of trauma into common parlance: now that the vocabulary of trauma appears everywhere in popular media, people are more inclined to use this vocabulary when describing their experiences. And yet, as this special issue shows, by bringing musical cultures of the long nineteenth century in dialogue with trauma studies, we underline trauma as an important lens through which to view the events and musical pieces, practices and cultures of this rich historical period in which trauma as a concept came to be developed and studied. This project also forges links between various arts and scientific disciplines, expanding what is possible in terms of trauma-focused medical humanities research based in the nineteenth century. In so doing, we demonstrate to nineteenth-century music studies scholars – many of whom might be unfamiliar with trauma theory – some of the different ways in which trauma theory can be applied to shed new light on pre-World War II musical cultures. Likewise, we demonstrate to those working in history, trauma studies and the medical humanities how focusing on sonic practices and experiences provides insight into the development of traumatic discourse in and beyond the nineteenth century.

Of course, studying pre-1939 musical cultures in relation to trauma presents challenges, including potential charges of anachronism. As noted above, Young argues that what today is termed PTSD did not exist prior to the last decades of the nineteenth century; rather, this is a socio-historically specific condition.⁶⁹ Although prior to the late-nineteenth century trauma as a concept may not have existed, large-scale, communal and individual suffering certainly did. In her study of narratives of trauma in French-Revolution-era literature, Katherine Astbury notes that ‘modern trauma theory provides us with a set of concepts and a vocabulary that allow us systematically to analyse’ texts that emerged during and after the 1789 Revolution, even while pointing out that trauma ‘is a notion rarely explored in detail’ in them.⁷⁰ For Astbury, however, although trauma fails to appear in these narratives in ways we might expect – expectations developed largely from the last 150 years of theorizing trauma – it nevertheless appears in unexpected ways, such as ‘ones of initial absence and silence’.⁷¹ Astbury's important work thus underlines that because trauma appears in myriad ways, we cannot discount its existence or impact in instances of silence, or when it appears in forms aside from those history has taught us to expect.⁷²

In fact, addressing trauma in musical cultures of the long nineteenth century is especially challenging due to the silences of one's historical subjects, especially when researching cultures in which, for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons, people rarely discussed trauma. As several of our contributors show, silence around trauma, resulting in part from class- and gender-based constructions of emotional expression, was pervasive throughout much of the long nineteenth century across different geographical regions. Gerk's essay demonstrates how US song traditions of the Civil War Era – several decades after the Irish Famine – documented the traumatic effects of the Famine for Irish immigrants to the United States that could not be expressed otherwise. Similarly, Rogers reads Ravel's post-World War I compositions as repositories of the trauma he experienced during and after the war – repositories constructed precisely because of the cultural imperative to remain silent about traumatic experience in interwar France. Meinhart confirms a similar imperative towards silence in her examination of The Hydra, in which many men published poems and stories about their experiences anonymously, in order to avoid the stigma that sharing personal accounts of pain and suffering might otherwise engender.

As these essays by Gerk, Meinhart and Rogers demonstrate, silence is a frequent characteristic of traumatic experience, rendering its discovery and documentation all the more difficult. In her watershed exposition on trauma, psychologist Herman argues that one dialectical relationship that has tended to characterize trauma is the oscillation between survivors’ need to narrativize their trauma and their simultaneous desire to remain silent, often out of fear of not only judgment or disbelief by interlocutors, but also retaliation, retraumatization and other repercussions of sharing details of traumatic experiences.⁷³ The pioneering work of musicologist Cizmic illuminates how this very dialectic can play out via music: in Performing Pain Cizmic argues that the silence around traumatic experience demanded of Soviet people under Stalin – under threat of physical and social violence – led to expressions of trauma in glasnost-era Eastern European musical works.⁷⁴ And yet, as cultural historian Winter demonstrates, silence, especially in the wake of traumatic experience, is performative; in his discussion of war and silence, Winter argues that ‘there are performative nonspeech acts through which some people tell us about war beyond words’.⁷⁵ Indeed, several of the authors whose work appears in this special issue address silence in musical composition or sonic experience as strangely telling. Thus, while at times traumatic experience appears in meaningful silences, in other instances, it appears in performers’ bodily movements, as Cizmic and Rogers show in their book projects, and as Morgan demonstrates in her article on popular parlour piano literature produced during the Mexican–American War in this special issue.⁷⁶

Another significant feature of traumatic experience is the frequent presence of ‘traumatic memory’, which operates in a number of ways that can make studying trauma challenging. Janet was one of the first psychologists to identify what he termed the persistence of an idée fixe in the words and behaviours of patients who had experienced trauma.⁷⁷ Janet understood traumatic memory to operate not only in the persistence of certain memories and feelings linked to a precipitating traumatic event, but also in dissociation – gaps in memory produced through patients’ adaptive strategy of distancing themselves from the trauma in a kind of wilful, even if unconscious forgetting. Freud followed closely on Janet's heels, defining traumatic memory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as a ‘compulsion to repeat’ aspects of the traumatic experience in words and behaviours, which he explains in terms of World War I veterans and children who had experienced separation anxiety.⁷⁸ More recently, Herman and Van der Kolk have moved away from the Freudian-based psychoanalytical approach that has dominated in the past century, addressing ways in which traumatic memory results in the return of the bodily-affective experience of traumatic events – an occurrence that has come to be referred to as ‘being triggered’ in common parlance.⁷⁹ This approach in many ways recalls Charcot's and Janet's work, which also emphasized bodily responses to trauma, as Brooks's article in this special issue underlines. As LaCapra has shown, traumatic memory poses special challenges for historians; in Writing History, Writing Trauma he recounts how one Holocaust survivor's memory of historical events differed from the historical record.⁸⁰ Disjunctures of this kind, he tells us, have persuaded many historians that trauma survivors’ testimonies should not be trusted when they concern the veracity of historical events. And yet, survivor testimonies – even when and perhaps because they are marked by traumatic memory – are extraordinarily important for what they might tell us about people's emotional responses to collectively and individually experienced events throughout history.

In the instances when testimony of traumatic events is recorded, these testimonies take many different forms. All of the contributors to this volume looked to a wide variety of sources – from diaries, memoirs, hospital publications and archival sources, to music magazines, newspapers, compositions and sheet music – in order to address the many and always multiple ways in which trauma manifests. As our authors show, sometimes trauma appears in silences, while in other instances it appears in performers’ bodily movements. Our authors find testimonies of trauma in images – in drawings of violent events, sheet music covers, concert reviews and the artwork and writings of shell-shocked soldiers.

It is important to remember that a number of social factors, including race, gender, class, nationality, religion, political affiliation and citizenship status, shape the archive of trauma testimony. As LaCapra has pointed out, ‘It is what is allowed or made to enter into publicly accessible memory – not historical research in general – which enables the past to be available for both uses and abuses, and the precise manner in which it becomes available (or is suppressed, distorted or blocked) is of the utmost importance’.⁸¹ The vast majority of the testimony that the authors of the scholarship in this issue address comes from white, affluent men and women in the US, UK and France. We have their testimonies because publishers and/or newspapers thought their testimonies worth printing, and the librarians, archivists, institutions and individuals in charge of preserving materials found these testimonies worth preserving. In Trauma: A Social Theory, Alexander asserts the importance of recognizing trauma as a social construction – as a story that communities who have been collectively traumatized construct about themselves and what happened to them.⁸² His formulation of trauma emphasizes the extent to which media, state and local institutions, and the individuals who are in power within these shape testimonies and understandings of trauma. These narrations of trauma necessarily omit things and are often one-sided in nature; social privilege allows certain people to have their voices heard more than others, even while social privilege does not always prevent trauma.⁸³ In regard to the nineteenth century, keeping this imbalance in mind is especially important, given that many musical and verbal testimonies would have been performed orally but not necessarily written down. This may have been especially prevalent in illiterate cultures, as well as in cultures in which people did not want to leave a written record of a trauma. Our authors have recognized that the testimonial repository they have worked with is ultimately incomplete; and yet, this incompleteness should not be a barrier to research, but rather a consideration that haunts our work.

Even despite these challenges, identifying and examining music through trauma before Charcot's, Freud's and Janet's theorizations of the concept in the late nineteenth century is an important project for music scholars to undertake. Numerous historians and literary scholars have considered pre-twentieth-century texts through the lens of trauma, acknowledging that, despite the fact that trauma did not exist as a category prior to the late nineteenth century, people nevertheless experienced suffering that we might deem as traumatic, much of which emerges in artistic representations, personal materials and chronicles of historical events.⁸⁴ Within music studies, there has been no shortage of scholarly attention directed towards conflict, crisis, illness and violence – all of which might result in psychological trauma – prior to the twentieth century.⁸⁵ Despite the incredible richness and importance of these studies, these authors have not utilized trauma theory as a lens through which to consider the musical and sonic cultures and repertoires that they investigate. We assert that trauma studies has much to offer music and sound scholars working on auditory cultures of the pre-Holocaust past.

Trauma studies holds the potential to shed new and important light on a variety of musical and social phenomena of the long nineteenth century, including musical Romanticism, the sonic experiences of war, music in colonial contexts and sonic and musical performances of grief. By studying musical cultures with an eye towards traumatic experiences and the ways in which these have manifested and been constructed historically, music scholars can learn more about how and why certain nineteenth-century musical movements, genres and performances styles developed in the ways that they did. Moreover, the lens of trauma illuminates why composers, performers and listeners made certain musical, social and performance choices. In addition, trauma studies can provide critical contexts for understanding the traumatic effects of music's weaponization and sonic violence throughout history. Recent theorizations of how trauma gets constructed in various historical, social and cultural contexts can provide music scholars with frameworks for understanding how music becomes a medium through which memory and experience come to be narrated. By reflecting on intersections between music, trauma and sound in the past, we come to better understand how music and sound operate as generators, repositories or mediators of trauma in the present.

Significantly, numerous contributors to this issue illustrate that violent and traumatic phenomena that have often been thought to have originated in the First and Second World Wars in fact were in existence for decades prior to these two global conflicts. For example, Johnson-Williams highlights how concentration camps invented and created by the British to imprison Afrikaner populations during the South African War prefigured the better-known concentration camps of the Holocaust. She then shows how sonic technologies of incarceration and social control shaped traumatic imprisonment not only during World War I, but also in present-day prisons.⁸⁶ Similarly, Brooks demonstrates that many of the French narratives of sonic-based trauma, as well as the medical categorizations for trauma, that have frequently been associated with World War I experience, emerged 45 years earlier in the immediate wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. In revising previously held historical notions of the development of trauma as a concept, as well as historical understandings of ‘modern’ technologies of war, this issue's authors aim to speak not only to musicologists, but also to historians, art and literature scholars and social theorists.

Ultimately, we hope that this special issue illustrates the extent to which utilizing trauma as a lens through which to view and understand musical and sonic cultures and practices provides new ways of understanding nineteenth-century history. By approaching the composers, performers, musicians and listeners of nineteenth-century US, imperial Britain, and France with a focus on how war affected their minds, bodies and the stories they told about themselves and their enemies, we have revealed the important role that emotions, corporeality and pain have played in history – including music history. Music and sonic histories developed through attention to trauma thus bring to light the importance of turning to the audible – which is, of course, also the tactile⁸⁷ – when asking questions about historical, political and social events, and perhaps especially in instances of war. In this way, we demonstrate with this special issue the significant link that trauma can provide between researchers in a variety of disciplines.

From Conversation to Collaboration: A Brief Contextualization of this Special Issue

This special issue is the result of several years of formal and informal collaboration, building upon our individual specialisations on the US, France and Britain. The plans for this issue were laid as far back as 2015, when Meinhart began working as a Fulbright Scholar with Bennett Zon in Durham University's Music Department and Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. With this support, Morgan, Rogers and Meinhart came together in May 2017 to present at the ‘Conflict, Healing and the Arts in the Long Nineteenth Century’ conference that Meinhart had organized. In the same year, Brooks and Rogers assembled a panel on music and trauma for the 2017 meeting of the American Musicological Society in Rochester, New York. The following year Brooks, Johnson-Williams, Rogers and Meinhart presented early versions of the articles that would appear in this issue at the ‘Music, Trauma, and the Medical Humanities’ Conference at Durham University in April 2018, and all of the contributors to this special issue presented their work on music and trauma in the long nineteenth century in a roundtable at the 2018 meeting of the American Musicological Society in San Antonio, Texas. In 2019 we continued these collaborative activities, presenting the research that this special issue showcases at the 55th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association at The Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, which engendered an invaluable response from Nicholas Reyland that has indelibly shaped this editorial introduction, as well as each of our articles. Importantly, we have shared our work in this special issue collaboratively at non-music conferences as well, including the ‘Cities in Conflict’ conference at University College Cork in June 2019 and the First World War Network's ‘The First World War: Past, Present and Future’ conference at Edinburgh Napier University in the same month. Our collaborative work on interrelationships between music, sound and trauma will not stop with the publication of this issue, however: Brooks, Rogers and Meinhart have submitted a proposal to the American Musicological Society to found a Study Group on the topic of music, sound and trauma; Rogers, in conjunction with Cizmic, has submitted a special colloquy on music and trauma to the Journal of the American Musicological Society; and Rogers, Brooks and Meinhart organized the virtual conference ‘Music and Trauma Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ in February 2021. Funded by an Indiana University Presidential Arts and Humanities Conference Hosting Grant, this conference included over 1,000 attendees and 150 presenters from across the globe. We have also submitted a proposal to Oxford University Press to co-edit an Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound and Trauma Studies.

However, in addition to these official channels in which we collaborated, our informal conversations over the last several years have been just as fruitful in the development of this special issue. Rogers, Brooks and Meinhart met at a First World War conference at the British Library in 2014. As Rogers and Meinhart began to develop this special issue, each recruited friends who were conducting fascinating, cutting-edge research on relationships between music, sound and trauma, resulting in a network that has grown each year. How our deepening friendships have impacted our work positively cannot be emphasized enough; in many ways, we see this special issue as a testament to the importance of friendship, collaboration and interdependence in academic work – all elements of research that, quite frankly, have not yet received the attention they should. This special issue is the result of having many conversations over several years about how trauma theory might be helpful for our projects. Although some of us came to special issue as experts in trauma theory, others took up this new corpus of discourse specifically for their projects for this issue, enthusiastically dialoguing with those with more or different knowledge about trauma. Thus, we aim to show with this issue that just about anyone can use trauma theory with a bit of guidance and conversation, ingenuity and creative thinking – not to mention, quite a bit of reading. Ultimately, we hope that this special issue offers readers a new lens through which to view musical and sonic phenomena in and beyond the nineteenth century, while also shedding light on the extent to which people's most difficult experiences and deepest feelings – and the violence and social inequities from which these so often arise – deserve continued careful consideration.

Ironically, it is somewhat fitting that we finish and submit this issue in the midst of a global pandemic in which the current parlance for trauma has become even more pervasive in everyday discourse. During this time, definitions of trauma are being rapidly expanded and revised as people throughout the world struggle with illness and death, lack of resources and protection, restrictions on freedom, mass economic uncertainty, loneliness and greatly altered work and educational environments. But as in the past, music and sound – from the daily or weekly shout-outs for healthcare workers to musical productions created via Zoom and shared through social media – once again are at the forefront of individuals’ and communities’ responses to these traumatic situations.