Soldiers and music

That soldiers sang, played and listened to music during the war is well known; but while soldiers’ music might seem an obvious topic for enquiry into the musical landscape of the war, until lately it has largely been neglected or considered only within chapters or sections of larger projects.Footnote ⁷ Thus, Hanna’s Sounds of War, in its examination of ‘servicemen’s musical encounters, illuminating why, where and how music was provided and experienced by performers and servicemen alike’ (p. 3), is the most extensive study to date on music in the British Armed Forces during the war. Like most before her who have approached this topic, Hanna is a cultural historian. That musicologists have not studied the military’s musical landscape of the war is unsurprising since such material detailing this music has been relegated to the margins of archives – and often the kind of archives and sources that musicologists have not traditionally used. This lack of interest by musicologists is ironic, given that, as Hanna notes, ‘servicemen’s songs and music which were widely sung and played during the Great War form key topographical features in the landscape of Britain’s memory of 1914–1918’ (p. 4). Indeed, as I point out elsewhere, media programmes and televised commemoration ceremonies around the time of the centenary of the Armistice featured a handful of songs written or sung by soldiers during the war, presenting the appearance of a ‘soundtrack’ to Britain’s cultural memory of the war.Footnote ⁸ Thus, this topic is ripe for research exploration on many levels, and Hanna’s monograph is timely.

Hanna demonstrates the extreme extent to which music was integrated into the daily life and functions of the British military, both officially and unofficially, illuminating numerous situations in which music was used that scholars have not recognized. For example, military bands accompanied recruitment and fundraising events (chapter 2); and she details specific bands and what they played at specific events (repertoire choices that were well calculated and considered), as well as interaction with civilians and some of the personalities of the musicians involved. Bands played men from recruiting offices to railway stations and on their journeys to training centres, and accompanied parades of recruits through London. Particularly interesting is her consideration of POWs and music (chapter 5). She shows how musical entertainments at POW camps were sometimes covers for escape attempts and how music was used at railway station platforms as POWs returned home – the Band of the Coldstream Guards played patriotic tunes and familiar airs like ‘Home Sweet Home’ at St Pancras, for example. She also highlights the role of religious music (chapter 6), showing how hymns were sung not only by soldiers during worship, but also in more dire circumstances, such as when chaplains attended to men before their military executions.

One particularly important way in which Hanna’s work expands our understanding of soldiers and music and answers calls from cultural history for more globally orientated views of the war is through consideration of how British military music was used in dominion and Allied countries. Performances in Canada, France and Italy were organized ‘to project power and inspire confidence’ and to promote diplomacy (p. 49). She also addresses the YMCA’s work across the military services (especially their establishment of huts near the war fronts), which in many ways centred on music. The organization’s main aim was to provide comfort, pastoral care and education, all in the effort to discourage drunken behaviour. But Hanna also examines the YMCA’s work with Indian and Chinese servicemen, which included bringing in indigenous instruments and music. She addresses music in British hospitals abroad too (chapter 7), such as the Front Recreation Rooms in Egypt and Palestine, which sometimes included performances of local music and also coordinated outings into the cities during which soldiers reported on hearing local music. Hanna rightfully considers the strain and trauma put on performers in these situations, which is an area that certainly calls for more consideration, especially because these performers typically relayed these experiences publicly through a filter of patriotic pride. She also points to ways in which music often accompanied soldiers’ drills and exercises, emphasizing the contemporary belief in music’s connection with the physical and with healing – a view that many in the medical establishment and prominent entertainers who performed for soldiers, such as Lena Ashwell, held paramount and voiced publicly.

To that end, Hanna devotes ample attention to civilians – such as Ashwell, Clara Butt, Annette Hullah, Isadore de Lara and Mary Paget – who performed or organized entertainments for military men at home and abroad, alongside the efforts of the Music in Wartime Committee (chaired by C. Hubert Parry). Figures like Hullah and Paget certainly merit further enquiry, and here Hanna builds upon work already done on Ashwell and a handful of other women regarding the connection between music and the philanthropic roles of women during the war.Footnote ⁹ Hanna also brings to life lesser-known musically inclined individuals like John Mackenzie-Rogan, bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards and member of the Recruiting Band executive committee. Hanna weaves his story throughout several of the book’s chapters, and dipping him in and out of the larger narrative enables her to illuminate the voice of an ‘everyday’ person.

Music made by fighting men themselves figures prominently in the book. Hanna addresses the countless situations in which soldiers sang, offering examples from contemporaneous first-hand witnesses such as the chaplain Pat Leonard, whose written account of spending 24 hours with a unit gives much attention to the soundscape of the experience. She addresses the usual expected occasions on which soldiers sang, such as on marches and going into battle, but also uncovers details about others that may not be so well known, such as during drinking binges. Hanna details what they sang – from the older army and navy songs handed down in published song books to the predictable popular songs of the day (the most notorious and mocked being ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’). But most interesting and new in this discussion is what Hanna reveals about musical exchange among men – from Durham miners teaching Butterworth a number of folk tunes to British soldiers reporting on hearing German soldiers’ music and the Germans picking up and singing some of the British songs across the trenches. Her point that servicemen singing was a good barometer for satisfaction among officers at any given moment, and that a lack of singing could indicate discontent, illuminates music’s entwinement with military power structures, resistance and social class. Soldiers’ performances at concert parties (chapter 10) have not previously been explored, either. These parties gave musical opportunities to amateur performers who in regular life at home would not have had them, even leading some men to continue to play semi-professionally after the war was over. Regimental bands were also extremely important in the accompaniment of day-to-day activities, as well as in the emotional lives of the men, as Hanna shows in her discussion of the loss of morale for the English and Irish armies when many band members were placed into other roles deemed to be more essential, such as stretcher bearing. With no band, the men were left to whistle and sing for themselves, which many noted was morally deflating in comparison with Scottish regiments’ proud display of pipers and drums.

Additionally, Hanna details examples of soldiers’ musical creativity. Not only did they refashion everyday objects into musical instruments, they also sometimes composed music for newly written pantomimes or as memorials to lost friends. One example comes from the aforementioned Rogan, who composed a military march entitled The Bond of Friendship after his friend Esmund Elliot of the Scots Guards was killed. Soldiers also often made up words to bugle calls and penned lyrics to existing songs and hymns. Especially interesting are the song lyrics men made up about captivity while in POW camps. Usually humorous, these lyrics often referenced army training manuals and/or previous conflicts, showing a sense of tradition within the army discourse.

Although not explicitly stated until the book’s conclusion, an important theme that can be teased out of Hanna’s book is the role of music in helping British soldiers to feel connected with home. The gramophone was especially important (chapter 8) in the emotional lives of servicemen, a fact which seems to hinge ultimately on its ability to bring them music from home. Soldiers welcomed this technology – ‘these carriers of West End London right to the heart of the war zone’ (p. 169) – but they also remarked (even in fan letters to the singers themselves) on the strangeness of the disembodied voice of the singer in these locations. Popular stars of the day were ‘making Tinned music for Tommy’, which meant that they ‘have “sung” under shellfire’ (p. 169). Hanna also explores exchanges of recordings between the home and war fronts. While recordings reminded them of the music hall, live music conjured up other memories of home. Civilian musicians travelling with concert parties at the fronts (chapter 9) were literal connections with home, which the men appreciated and on which they commented. (Hanna’s recognition of the traumatic experiences these travelling musicians faced is also important.) Soldiers on several occasions noted that classical music reminded men of their sisters and mothers, who would play this music at the piano back at home. And that the YMCA gave dominion soldiers indigenous instruments and opportunities to hear music of their own countries was certainly no accident; the goal was to help them feel connected with home. Feeling good about and nostalgic for home could inspire pride in one’s country and renewed energy for the war effort. So, perhaps ultimately, what Hanna’s thick description of music in the British military reveals is that music was in many ways about morale and patriotism, but that it was also about consoling homesickness and feeling connected with loved ones – a point that will echo with Rogers’s book.

Popular song

Although musicological enquiry into the First World War has largely ignored popular song, several book-length studies published in the last few years have begun to document not only the scale of the wartime popular music industry (from sheet music to gramophone recordings to star singers) but also the importance of popular song in soldiers’ and civilians’ lives. Indeed, John Mullen’s previous volume The Show Must Go On! illuminates a vast repertoire and culture of wartime British popular song, centred mainly on that of the music hall.Footnote ¹⁰ Christina Gier details popular song’s function in a variety of US war-related settings and intersections with race and gender as well as other contemporary war-related issues, such as pacifism and propaganda.Footnote ¹¹ Anne Simon and Chris Bourke address popular song with regard to France and New Zealand respectively.Footnote ¹² Other studies have touched on popular song tangentially, most often in connection with soldiers’ singing and listening.Footnote ¹³ But in the edited volume Popular Song in the First World War, Mullen aims to extend beyond Britain the focused consideration in The Show Must Go On! of the social functions of wartime popular song.

Mullen’s main objective (‘Introduction: Beyond the Question of Morale: Popular Song in the First World War’, pp. 1–15; ‘What Voices Can Be Heard in British Music-Hall Songs of the First World War?’, pp. 18–34) is to ‘pull wartime popular song out of its stereotype as morale building jingoism, and underline its usefulness to historians as a record of the enjoyments, anxieties, feelings and fantasies of the mass of the population who left far fewer traces than the elite in the historical record’ (p. 13). A ‘series of mass activities’, popular song is ‘a way that generations of artistes and audiences represent the world to themselves and to each other’ (p. 1), and a way in which they engage with a complex set of legitimate, real-life concerns and contemporary social issues. Through strong continuity with pre-war themes and styles, popular song across numerous countries was a vehicle for the expression of identities (such as rural, urban, imperial, heterosexual) and of beliefs and hopes (such as attitudes about minorities and desires to escape poverty). Thus Mullen, as a sociologist, is most interested in ‘what voices’ – from the ‘penniless lyricist’ to the ‘rhyming soldier’ – and makes clear that this volume emphasizes mass society, both in its singing and in its show business, in these last years ‘before the generalization of the gramophone’ (Preface, p. i).

Despite the diversity of countries and scholars represented, the volume is held together thematically by the overarching contention that a number of dynamics influenced the ‘mass activity’ that is popular song in each of the countries considered: the degree of urbanization and industrialization, established traditions of song writing, different traditions of links between war and music, and intersections of song writing with the legal and industrial frameworks in each country. Moreover, as Mullen points out, across all the countries considered, live performance and sheet music were the main conduits for popular song repertoire; both reached far more people than did the gramophone, and Mullen includes the statistics that show this fact, even in the case of Britain, where gramophones caught on quickly.

With these connections and this framework across the countries established, the volume proceeds to introduce slices of popular song culture, repertoire and/or practices in a variety of countries. While Mullen addresses popular song and singers in the institution of the British music hall (particularly their resonances with working-class audiences), others in the volume examine musical practices connected to militaries. Echoing Hanna’s work, Eric Sauda (‘French Popular Song at the Front during the Great War’, pp. 35–49) explores a variety of uses of popular song in the French military – from departures to support for insubordination to contests near battlefields. André Rottgeri (‘German Soldier Songs in the First World War and Beyond’, pp. 50–63) focuses on bringing to light German soldiers’ songs, a little-known topic, for, as he points out, ‘after two disastrous world wars for Germany, the interest in soldier songs declined strongly’ (p. 50).Footnote ¹⁴

Other chapters on Britain, France, the US and Germany explore topics that will probably be even more unknown to most than music hall and soldiers’ songs, all offering alternative perspectives to the morale-boosting and jingoistic one normally associated with popular music during the war. Articles by Clive Barrett (‘The Music of War Resistance in Britain, 1914–1918’, pp. 64–83) and Guy Marival (‘In Search of the French Anti-War Song, the “Chanson de Craonne”’, pp. 84–99) both discuss songs associated with dissent and objection to the war, while Anne Simon (‘Couples in French Popular Song and the Challenges of the Great War’, pp. 103–120), Christina Gier (‘Masculinity, War and Song in America 1917–1918’, pp. 121–33), Amy Wells (‘From Tulips and Curls to Donuts and Jazz: The Representation of Women in American Popular and Soldier Songs during the First World War’, pp. 134–51) and Melanie Schiller (‘Staging the Nation: Claire Waldoff and Berlin Cabaret before and during the Great War’, pp. 152–68) posit connections between popular song and gender. Simon focuses on French songs about romantic couples during the war. These deal not only with the expected themes of heartache and separation but also more interestingly with the challenges couples faced once the man returned home from war injured and/or shell-shocked. Gier’s chapter, one of the strongest and most theoretically driven in the volume, addresses discourses of masculinity in the plethora of US wartime sheet music, employing Julia Kristeva’s ideas of the ‘speaking subject’ in the context of soldiers’ singing, and arriving overall at a nuanced understanding of how music intersects with identity politics in the military. Wells addresses the representation of women and their roles in American song, as well as Elsie Janis’s contributions at the war front, both as a nurse and leader of musical entertainments and as a wartime song lyricist. Schiller positions cabaret in Berlin during the war through the career of Claire Waldoff, showing how it shifted from being a critical commentator on modernity and urbanization before the war to being instrumental in propagating nationalistic ideas during the war.

The remainder of the chapters in the volume turn to musical practices and popular song elsewhere in Europe and the colonies, and are focused on national and political identities. Chris Bourke’s article (‘“We Shall Get There in Time”: Contemporary Responses to the First World War by New Zealand Songwriters’, pp. 171–87) examines wartime popular song in New Zealand by both Paekha and Maori lyricists and composers, and examines Maori adaptations of British songs and music connected with Gallipoli – both music reported as having been sung during the battle and that written in response to it. Erick Falc’her-Poyroux (‘Irish Songs of World War I’, pp. 188–205) looks at the varied songs sung and written in Ireland during the war, and how they are intertwined with contemporary political turmoil – from the fight for Home Rule (1912–14) and the Dublin Lockout (1913–14) to the Easter Rising of 1916. Lidia López (‘Popular Music and Eroticism: The Spanish Cuplé during the Years of the First World War’, pp. 206–22) explores the role of cuplé in Spanish wartime society, and Pedro Félix (‘A Business without an Industry: The Portuguese Music Business in Turbulent Times’, pp. 223–41) addresses the Portuguese traditions of fado and teatro de revista during the war, particularly as written and sung by soldiers. Such songs reflect the stress of the war and growing discontent with the Portuguese government, and point to intersections with politics and government censorship. He also considers these genres’ place in the Portuguese cultural memory of the war, particularly in light of the increased censorship that the post-war years and the dictatorial regime change brought. The contribution by Dragan Aleksić, Maja Vasiljević and Nataša Simeunović Bajić on Serbia (‘Early Serbian Popular Songs during the Great War outside of Serbia’, pp. 242–56) also points to connections between popular song and collective memory of the war, in addition to demonstrating how wartime musical activities both in military camps and on the home front were foundational to post-war popular musical practices and the recording of Salonika repertoire.

Although it claims international perspective, the volume is still focused solely on the Global North – indeed, Mullen himself points this out and lists countries missing from the south (such as India, South Africa and Japan) as well as more from the north which would certainly warrant attention (such as Italy, Russia and Greece). Nevertheless, few books are as diverse as this one in terms of both perspective and collaboration among scholars from many different countries. The approach to popular song from the bottom up, illuminating it as an activity driven by and resonating with ordinary people exhibiting a range of ‘what voices’ from around the world who were impacted by this total war, exemplifies a kind of decolonized approach that is admirable and much needed in musicology.

Recontextualizing art music

In addition to these thick description approaches to music in the military and popular song as represented by Hanna and Mullen, art music has also seen a variety of new interpretations and perspectives put forth in relation to Britain in the last decade. Eric Saylor and Matthew Riley have both proposed rethinking how we might understand the pastoral trope in relation to the war.Footnote ¹⁵ Vanessa Williams and Jane Angell have illuminated aspects of classical musical life in London during the war that have not previously been addressed, from charity concerts to the ways in which the London conservatoires reacted and adapted.Footnote ¹⁶ Scholars have also theorized wartime and post-war compositions within ideas of commemoration and memorial.Footnote ¹⁷ Others have considered the engagement of wartime art music (and criticism of it) with ideas of modernism.Footnote ¹⁸

But two recent studies on France present two of the freshest new ways of looking at art-music cultures and musicians. Both are highly dependent on and driven by theory and perspectives from other disciplines: political history in the case of Rachel Moore’s Performing Propaganda and trauma studies in the case of Jillian C. Rogers’s Resonant Recoveries. While many musicological studies purport to be interdisciplinary (to the point that the term has become nearly meaningless these days), in these two cases true interdisciplinary imports permeate the ways in which the authors consider their musical subject matters. As a result, both books take us well beyond the simple morale-boosting, patriotic and commemorative approaches to understanding classical music’s responses to the war, and ultimately depict a France, or rather a Paris, that looks very different when viewed from these distinctive disciplinary approaches.

Moore demonstrates how propaganda shaped musical institutions during the war and argues that music was part of ‘wider propaganda initiatives aiming to influence public opinion, both at home and abroad’ (p. 6). Derived from definitions put forth by contemporary thinkers about propaganda (such as Howard Lasswell) and political historians (such as Joseph Nye and David Welch), her understanding of propaganda during the war as ‘national publicity’, ‘dissemination’ and ‘advertising’ (p. 7) – in contrast to more modern configurations of it as manipulation, exaggeration and lies – is key to how she considers wartime art-music practices and its institutions.

In several ways Moore’s study aligns with theorizations and methodologies used by cultural historians rather than musicologists, particularly in its emphasis on a ‘total war’ that affected vast segments of the population. Contrary to many musicological studies, this does not see the war as a cataclysmic breaking point with the past in terms of French musical practice, style and institutions (pp. 1–2). Moore is in line here with Jay Winter’s ideas of the ways in which responses to the war often mined past artistic models and practices for inspiration rather than evincing great stylistic changes (pp. 2–3).Footnote ¹⁹ As the personal anecdote with which she begins her introduction shows, Moore has also rummaged persistently through archives and sources (often uncatalogued) not usually associated with music.

But Moore’s musicological prowess underpins her arguments too, particularly as related to Paris’s musical institutions, composers and repertorial trends. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the impact of the onset of war on Paris’s musical institutions, from the Opéra to the Concerts Mayol, focusing on changes in personnel and programming – specifically on how the boundaries of genres and artistic domains were blurred. Potpourri-like formatting, which included a mix of opera numbers, songs, orchestral movements and solos, was adopted for concerts, hearkening back to eighteenth-century practices. Chapter 2 documents how musical performances by French musicians abroad, and in some cases French music, were used to influence international public opinion of France and its war effort. This ‘musician-led propaganda’ was a kind of ‘soft power’ and was less vitriolic than ‘the hostile discourse disseminated in print, enabling French culture to be promoted directly and without condemning enemy nations in the process’ (p. 47). As an example, she chronicles the French government’s hand in establishing French musicians as leaders in American musical institutions, such as Pierre Monteux at the Met. French musicians in the US gave the French great influence over US programming, especially since the Germans in many of these posts had been booted out. Here, music and musicians functioned as a kind of soft power that had influence on American public opinion and the French and Allied cause.

French musicians were also involved in more ‘hard power’ efforts to promote the French cause, as Moore in chapter 4 argues for Saint-Saëns’s Germanophilie (1914), a diatribe against Germanic artistic infiltration of French culture and a model of the early academic propagandistic efforts of the Institut de France. A form of what she deems to have been ‘emotional propaganda’, it reveals his nostalgia for the pre-1870 and pre-Franco-Prussian War world, in which opéra comique embodied French culture – before it was contaminated by Wagner and Wagnerism. Chapter 4 situates the programming of the Matinées Nationales concert series, established in November 1914 at the Sorbonne, as propaganda. Including spoken word (such as speeches and poetry), the series promoted a sense of union sacrée in which individual members of the audience could through a shared national culture find comfort, mourn losses and show respect towards those fighting and killed. These concerts also paid homage to Allied nations – creating a kind of supranational patriotism and union sacrée – through including repertoire and musicians of these countries, as for example during the orchestra’s trip to London in February 1915, when Elgar’s Carillon featured prominently. (Elgar was the only English composer included in any of the Matinées Nationales concerts.)

Chapter 5 focuses on the Opéra, from its initial closure at the start of the war, to the establishment by its director, Jacques Rouche, of opera concerts at the Trocadéro (so that Opéra musicians would have some form of employment), to the reopening of the Opéra in December 1915. Moore considers Rouche’s varied and strategic programming as propaganda, especially his inclusion of French instrumental music and opera excerpts from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth (such as Lully and Rameau), as well as crowd-pleasers from the nineteenth century (such as those by Donizetti and Gounod). Chapter 6 turns to music publishing. Through the publication of ‘national’ collections, French publishers such as Jacques Durand aimed to promote national regeneration and the creation of French editions of classical music (such as the Beethoven sonatas). These editions were meant to counter German editions in France that had been dominant since the late nineteenth century, and to compete with Germany in the international sheet-music market.

Moore’s import of wider notions of propaganda enables her to revise understandings of several aspects of French musical life during the war. First, propaganda reframes French musicians’ drawing upon French musical history in their compositions and programming. It was not just nationalistic or a kind of orthodox patriotism, as Jane Fulcher has argued in the case of contemporary French avant-garde composition;Footnote ²⁰ rather, in Moore’s formulation it was viewed as cultural diplomacy or national publicity. Secondly, Moore illuminates cultural exchange and diplomacy via musical performances (even when French music was not played) as a kind of propaganda. Although some of these models from music led to a more centralized approach to propaganda from the government, in her conclusion Moore notes that the case studies in each of these chapters were early efforts at musical propaganda that for the most part did not reach their full potential. Austro-German musical culture – from repertoire performed to editions of music purchased – remained prominent in French musical life after a brief hiatus in 1914 at the start of the war. Austro-German was ‘normal’ and universal to many French music lovers, and that it remained nearly a constant in spite of such French propagandistic efforts showed a continuity with pre-war life. Such attempts did generate, though, ‘an increased awareness of the opportunities of music for official organised propaganda. The infrastructures set up in the earlier conflict laid vital groundwork which would allow musical propaganda to be established on a much larger scale in later decades’ (p. 220).

While Moore’s book ultimately hinges on how musical repertoire and practices of the past were adopted and reinterpreted as propaganda in very public-facing ways, countering notions of the war as rupture with past artistic and cultural practices, Rogers’s Resonant Recoveries theorizes another way in which the French musical past was drawn upon: French modernist composers’ mining of the past through the modern neoclassical style was therapeutic after the trauma of the war. But Rogers deals with music more broadly than just neoclassicism. She argues that music – from the rhythmically repetitive neoclassical style (chapter 3) to the soothing vibrations of instruments (chapter 2) to the humour of Jean Cocteau and his circle (chapter 5) to the recalling of the presence of deceased loved ones through a variety of musical activities (chapter 4) – functioned for many French musicians as a consolatory practice during and just after the war. As she points out, while other scholars such as Jane Fulcher, Barbara Kelly and Tamar Levitz have acknowledged the ‘emotional toll that the war took on musicians, […] a focus on politics, national identity and modernist aesthetics has generally overshadowed in-depth consideration of these musicians’ emotional lives’ (p. 3).Footnote ²¹ Thus, here we can indeed learn something new about, or perhaps understand differently, well-known figures such as Nadia Boulanger, Marguerite Long, Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie.

Signs of trauma in the primary sources upon which Rogers draws were often not explicit since grief and emotions were not shared readily during this time, when stoicism was the norm. Contextualizing them within period medical and psychology texts, obituaries and funeral accounts in Parisian newspapers, musical compositions, concert programmes and photographs, though, she reads musicians’ diaries and letters as what Ann Cvetkovich has termed ‘archives of feelings’.Footnote ²² In this sense, texts, including musical compositions, are encoded not only with clues of trauma but also with the practice of creating and receiving texts engaged with traumatic experience.Footnote ²³ But it is her interpretation of these words within trauma theory frameworks that enables her to formulate new ideas of the role of art music during and just after the war. She draws on contemporary ideas of trauma – particularly that theorized by the French psychologists Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot – and on more modern understandings of trauma and recovery, such as those of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth and Bessel van der Kolk.Footnote ²⁴ Important for her is also the concept of ‘insidious trauma’, as coined by Maria P. Root,Footnote ²⁵ in which everyday experiences exist within a continued milieu of feelings of fear, shame, helplessness, anxiety and grief. This concept enables her to speak to the traumatic experiences not only of those who witnessed combat, but also of those on the home front who worried continuously about and grieved for loved ones.

Central within Rogers’s theoretical underpinning and understanding of music in interwar France is music’s connection with the physical body – the ‘relationships between musical practices and the physiological responses and effects of the bodies of those who engage in them [… and] how people’s bodies respond to trauma, as well as how musical activities engage and affect traumatized bodies’ (p. 16). Drawing on Tia DeNora’s reading of music within Foucault’s ‘corporeal technology of the self’,Footnote ²⁶ Rogers argues that ‘interwar French musicians approached and understood music as a “corporeal technology of consolation” capable of altering or maintaining emotional and psychological states’ (p. 20). Contemporary French theorists also closely linked the psychological with the physiological, until the mid-1920s rejecting outright Freud and his emphasis on the unconscious because it would force them to abandon the notion of the human mind as embodied. Thus, French psychologists saw movement and exercise as effective ways to cope with trauma – ideas that have had a resurgence today in the work of Peter Levine and Van der Kolk.Footnote ²⁷ Within this fell music-making, which ‘was a resonant and resonating medium for, if not always recovery (as a definitive end-goal), then at the very least for recovering, a process centred on continuing to live in the wake of profoundly life-altering pain’ (p. 33).

In proposing this understanding of the role of music in consoling war-inflicted trauma in France, Rogers opens windows onto the emotional lives of men and women of the day, many of them familiar figures to musicologists, and also onto music as an empowering technology in these years before music therapy was fully recognized. Rogers’s focus on ‘corporeal technology’ refocuses our attention on the emotional impact of bodily trauma and pain. Moreover, her work expands our understanding of the modern neoclassical style, even countering previous understandings of it, such as those of Scott Messing, Daniel Albright, Deborah Mawer, Richard Taruskin and Caroline Potter, which position it within modernist predilection towards limiting emotional expression and interest in mechanics and machines.Footnote ²⁸ Rather than just a return to simplicity, a nod to the past and an expression of anti-Romantic, anti-German sentiment, it was a style that could induce physiological resonances and was therefore closely aligned with contemporary ideas of healing.