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Yet music has also coursed through the ascendency of the world’s preeminent military force. Since the Civil War, the United States military has used music for everything from recruitment and training to signaling and mourning. Ceremonial music has welcomed fighters at the moment of induction and honored them at funerals. Reveille has roused soldiers in the morning, taps instructed them when to sleep. Chanting cadences (“Sound off!/One, two!/Sound off!/Three, four!” and so on) has been part of soldiers’ physical and mental conditioning in boot camp. Musical strains have cheered soldiers in combat, and in a few cases, music has been deployed as a weapon. Soldiers have sung on the march, played pianos, harmonicas, and other instruments, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and filled the seats at live performances, both by fellow military personnel and by professional entertainers. Musical sounds have flowed through the history of American war-making, a “capillary” power (as philosopher Michel Foucault would call it) extending to the extremities of soldiers’ service.

Some of this musical activity has been improvised, but much of it has occurred by design. Both the makeshift and the intentional matter. In World War II, pianos were installed in the hulls of navy ships before they left boatyards, and specially constructed, olive-green Steinways were airlifted to infantrymen overseas. Often soldiers sang parodies—new lyrics written to familiar tunes—while other times, their songs came directly out of military-issued songbooks. In Vietnam, they traded tapes of records recently released stateside. In Iraq, they swapped whole collections of MP3s via thumb drives. Frequently, military personnel have had access to the cutting edge of (music) technology, from wind-up phonographs in the trenches of World War I to hi-fi equipment purchased at post exchange stores in Vietnam. Whether it meant nightly brass- band concerts during the Civil War or individualized listening to an iPod in Iraq, military life has often been a musical life. “It would be a dreary service indeed without music,” a Union officer concluded in 1862, “and I don’t believe the men could be kept together without it.”

This book explores how music has enabled the waging of American wars, both as an instrument of discipline and control for the military and as a means of emotional expression and self- preservation for rank-and-file warriors. It shows that music has been involved in all stages of what we might call the “life cycle” of soldiering, from recruitment and training to firefights and funerals. In the course of this musical activity, both the institution of the military and the soldiers in its ranks have used music as a means to advance their respective wartime goals: defeating enemies of the state on the battlefield and maintaining their emotional and psychological integrity. Music energizes; it emboldens; it has special significance in the military context. The work of soldiers requires extraordinary emotional labor: coping with the strain of putting their lives at risk and killing other humans, as well as surviving the tedium, boredom, and homesickness concomitant with everyday life in the armed forces. Making and listening to music has helped render the performance of this emotional labor possible. These musical practices have prepared and directed soldiers as fighters and empowered them as humans, helping them withstand the demands made on them while doing their jobs.

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In the military context, centering musical activity, instead of, say, songs, as our primary concern also helps us circumvent the conventional but misleading division between performers and audiences, for often the line between them has been blurred. In the armed forces, buglers, bandsmen, singing soldiers, audience members, and iPod-listeners have all been engaged in musical activity. Soldiers who start their day at the sound of reveille have likewise been involved in a musical practice, as have those tuning in to the latest popular hits on armed forces radio. So, too, have the military officials who have ordered or sanctioned performances, the contractors who have supplied military bands with sheet music and instruments, the music publishers who have granted the military permission to reprint lyrics in songbooks, and the civilians who have volunteered or made financial contributions to soldiers’ musical recreation.

For our purposes, what matters most is the web of relationships, both social and sonic, in which all these actors are enmeshed. The value of musical activity in (and for) the military does not rest individually in the sounds, the repertoire, the musicians, or the way soldiers respond. Rather, it lies in the interconnectedness of these elements and the structure that binds them, within which music can have radically different functions. Their common context mutes the tensions between these functions, fusing them to one another. For example, a military brass band in the Spanish-American War might have given a ceremonial performance for new arrivals at a training camp, resounding as the embodiment of military order. The band was authorized, sanctioned, and regulated. Its musicians were highly disciplined, were organized hierarchically, and played on command—attributes which neither players nor audiences ever lost sight of. On the other hand, the same band might have also performed at other times to entertain soldiers, playing an eclectic mix of patriotic anthems, traditional songs, and current popular favorites. What soldiers experienced, then, was a polished, well-coordinated ensemble that could move easily—seamlessly—from one mode to the other, capable of creating a sonic world in which “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” each had its place, complementing and reinforcing the feelings elicited by the others.

That music has done all this—that it has had these nuanced functions and multiple effects—is the result of an elaborate, dialectical process, which only music could animate, serving top-down and bottom-up ends, acting as an instrument of both military officials and the rank and file. Part of what has made music uniquely suited to do this is its protean, affective nature—its reach, versatility, and mutability; its capacity to be insinuated virtually anywhere, anytime; and its ability to move people, deeply, in mind and body. More than that, though, musical activity has been so valuable, so pervasive, so integral to war-making from above and below because it articulates—and allows soldiers to feel—the web of the relationships they are entangled in, and how those relationships, in turn, relate to one another. Only music can do this, because many of those relationships are of such immense subtlety and complexity that expressing and sorting them out verbally would be difficult or impossible. What words could adequately express a soldier’s fear of killing a stranger or never seeing a loved one again? What language could do justice to a warrior’s grief or resentment of the military? What other means could voice not only the simultaneity of these (and innumerable other) feelings but also the delicate, intricate ways they are interconnected?

At the same time, all this musical activity has existed in relation to other sounds, to the fighting of war itself—the cacophony of combat, the cries of the wounded and dying, the silences before and after battle. In response to these sounds, some musical activity has functioned as a means by which soldiers could exert control over their environment—a tool to displace, even for a few minutes, the soundscape governed by the military or by violence. On the one hand, music has made possible a certain kind of psychic escape, a way to be somewhere else. Listening to Count Basie and Duke Ellington on armed forces radio, a World War II G.I. recalled, “You are not in the Army—you are not at home—in fact, you are not anywhere—just out in the world of memories.” On the other hand, musical activity could be a way soldiers have asserted authority over space, not just a way to be transported afar but also a means to redeem the place where they are. Through music, the distant can feel near and the near feel distant. If sound mediates how we know and connect with the world, then in the sounds of music soldiers have found a valuable, meaningful way to reclaim some power over their immediate circumstances.