The congregation of the Unions at Birmingham on the 7th of May composed the largest meeting believed to have been ever held in Great Britain. The numbers did not fall short of 150,000. The hustings were erected at the bottom of the slope of Newhall Hill, in a position so favourable that the voices of most of the speakers reached to the outskirts of the great assemblage, and to the throngs on the roofs of the surrounding houses. The Unions poured in upon the ground in one wide unbroken stream till the gazers were almost ready to ask one another whether this was not a convention of the nation itself. At the sound of the bugle from the hustings, silence was instantly produced; and Mr. Attwood, the Chairman, announced to the assemblage the object of the meeting . . . While the Chairman was speaking, the Bromsgrove Union, which arrived late, was seen approaching from afar. Their assembled brethren greeted them with the Union Hymn—deserving of record from being then familiar to every child in the land. It never was so sung before, nor after; for now, a hundred thousand voices pealed it forth in music which has never died away in the hearts of those who heard it. Seventy-four members of the Society of Friends—men of education, who had just joined the Union on principle—might now know something of the power of music. A different order of men, who could not be on the ground—some soldiers of the Scots Greys who had quietly joined the Union—must have listened from within their barracks with a longing to be on the hill. The Duke of Wellington was reckoning on their services to finish the business, after all: but the Hymn seems to tell that the warlike intentions were wholly on one side.
—Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816–1846, 2:58Footnote 1Perhaps the most striking feature of Harriet Martineau's account of the famous 7 May 1832 reform meeting at Newhall Hill is her insistence that we must imagine listening to it. Music is central to her explication of the experience and significance of that pivotal moment. Through Martineau's auditory attentiveness—poignant given her almost total deafness by the early 1830s—we come to appreciate the acoustics of the hillside that made it such a natural choice for a gathering of this magnitude, and the implications of the sonic porousness of barracks. We feel the visceral force of music in marshaling marching bodies, fashioning order out of an otherwise disparate mass. We appreciate the emotional charge the event held for participants as the desire of the people for freedom found immediate, shared expression in song. And we recognize how, for both Martineau and her historical subjects, music was prominent in shaping the memory of events, with all the insights and distortions that might bring. As her history of the reform crisis implies, the “power of music” was a lived phenomenon, shaping and driving the action on the political stage; for Martineau, no history could be complete without it.
Although this extract is a particularly resonant example, Martineau was not the only historian of her generation with an ear for music: the sounds of “Lillibullero” or the “Marseillaise” echo through the pages of Macaulay and Carlyle.Footnote 2 Yet during the century and a half since Martineau wrote her account, this instinctual integration of music into political history largely vanished. As specialization and professionalization increasingly compartmentalized humanities scholarship, historians came to feel that music was not for them, while the silence of the archive seemed to confirm the irrelevance and futility of trying to capture this nontextual, evanescent substance for the historical record. Only in relatively recent years has a new confidence and imagination returned to historians’ handling of musical evidence, a move invigorated by changes in musicological scholarship, the emergence of sound studies, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity that has questioned some of the old ways of thinking.Footnote 3
This efflorescence of auditory histories has raised with increasing urgency numerous theoretical and methodological questions, which can be resolved into two fundamental problems: first, how to build comprehensive analyses of the multifaceted phenomenon of music and thereby more reliably discern the meanings it held for contemporaries; and second, how to pinpoint precisely what music can tell us about the past that the study of other sources and behaviors struggles to communicate. Each of the essays in this forum tackles these problems in relation to particular historical moments; collectively, they illustrate the richness of insight to be derived from attention to music and its past uses. The remainder of this introductory essay discusses these two problems in more general terms, reviewing briefly how historians have dealt with music, exploring and critiquing new methods of analysis that have been recently developed, and highlighting productive areas for future research. Although this forum is centered on our area of specialism—Britain and Ireland in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we believe that the issues tackled and techniques showcased here are applicable to other periods and beyond the subfield of political history.
Accounting for Music
Historians have long been aware of music, but its integration into the political histories they write began in earnest, like so much else, with the first flourishing of social history in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular with E. P. Thompson's fascination with cultural expressions of social experience. Thompson was among the first to incorporate ballads, song, and music into his analyses of British politics and class consciousness; in doing so, he initiated two contrasting approaches that have—in evolving forms—been continued ever since. The first, on display in several sections of The Making of the English Working Class, used songs as evidence for the shifting working-class consciousness that Thompson sought to trace. His anatomization of the cultural life of Yorkshire and Lancashire weaving communities, or the nuances of Luddite strategies of protest, are peppered with verses of ballads—such as “Jone o’ Grinfilt” or “General Ludd's Triumph”—used as telling illustrations of the mentalities animating those communities and movements.Footnote 4
As is well known, the 1980s and 1990s saw a widespread questioning of the frameworks of class and material understandings of social experience that had underpinned the assumptions of Thompson and others. And yet, in the turn to language and the cultural construction of social relations that followed, Thompson's emphasis on the importance of song was considerably strengthened, albeit divorced from preconceived notions of the social relations and consciousness it might be expressing. Where Thompson had used song in a largely unsystematic, illustrative fashion, historians such as James Vernon and Patrick Joyce devoted large sections of their books to scrutinizing song culture in order to trace the generic conventions and intertextual echoes that, they argued, structured and limited what the medium made it possible to say, think, or feel. Equally, drawing on contemporary developments in literary studies, they emphasized the reception and use of ballads rather than assuming their meaning was a self-evident product of authorial intent. Thus for Vernon, drawing on his study of ballads in political contests in Oldham and elsewhere, it was apparent that “it would be wrong to caricature ballads as ‘authentic’ expressions of working-class political sentiment, for they obstinately refused to fit into such neat sociological categories. Like many visual media they were the products of complex mediations between authors, performers, and audiences of all social levels.”Footnote 5 Furthermore, as ballads were freed from being read solely through the lens of class, historians of nationality, gender, and other social categories came to find in them an important resource for cultural analysis.Footnote 6
Despite the fruits of this upsurge of interest, it ultimately rested—just as Thompson's work did—on a treatment of ballads as texts, an assumption that is only partially sustainable. While many ballads were indeed printed and read, contemporary accounts make clear that this was neither their only nor their primary function. Rather, such sources reveal an interlocking oral, print, and musical culture, in which printed song sheets were sold by balladeers singing their wares on the streets, thereby teaching the tunes to their customers, who might, in turn, learn and perform these songs in the home, workplace, or alehouse.Footnote 7 The emphasis on song as text has thus led to some odd occlusions. Vernon, for instance—making explicit what others tacitly implied—drew a line between what he felt were textual and nontextual forms of “aural media,” excluding the latter from his analysis.Footnote 8 As a result, song in this scholarship frequently diminishes into sets of lyrics treated like poetry or speeches, while music (along with bells or gunfire) is denoted as purely sonic, nonlinguistic, and thus the property of a different field of study. Such a division ultimately rests on a distortion of what song is, in two respects. Firstly, it allows no room for the tune to carry associations of its own that communicate to the listener in a complex symbiosis with the words being sung, and that inseparably tie song into a broader musical culture of nonlinguistic or partially linguistic forms, such as marches, dances, and concert pieces. Moreover, these latter musical genres do significant cultural and political work of their own that should not be excluded from analysis simply because they do not explicitly feature text. Secondly, an approach that rests on the reading of lyrics leaves little space for the idea of song as a text that invites, if not requires, performance. For all their shared conventions, it is ultimately the mode of performance—the act of singing—that separates song from poetry. And performances—sung or otherwise—are moments in time and space whose meanings are influenced by what comes before and after, who is singing or playing and how, to whom, and where. Without a consideration of songs as texts in performance, it becomes extremely hard to know what their influence on social and political life might have been.
In search of a greater focus on performance, we might turn to the second aspect of Thompson's work on music, since alongside his inclusion of song texts in The Making of the English Working Class, he went on to develop interests in the act of singing and music-making. In an essay first published in 1972, he explored the phenomenon of “rough music,” an activity inhabiting a liminal zone between aspects of music—such as singing and playing instruments—and more general noise-making (chanting, shouting, banging of kettles and pans, and so on). He argued that this “rough music” was an integral part of the rites that bound communities together, expressing and enacting ideas of decency, shame, and justice. As a result, Thompson suggested, “rough music” played a vital role in the power dynamics of the community and, as such, could acquire a range of political uses, alongside its more common social functions.Footnote 9
Thompson's work left an important legacy for the study of what was increasingly termed political culture as historians came to conceive of politics as something more diffuse than the activities of individuals within the corridors of power. In this regard, work by Nicholas Rogers, Kathleen Wilson, and James Epstein took over where Thompson left off: each frequently incorporated music-making into their richly layered accounts of the rituals of political culture. In their analyses, singing “Lillibullero” or “The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again,” the “Marseillaise,” or “God Save the King” took an important place alongside sporting party-colored ribbons, cockades, dresses, and caps of liberty, planting British oaks or liberty trees, and parading and burning various effigies, to name just a few of the many ways in which political rivalries were symbolically expressed.Footnote 10 Epstein's subsequent work, in dialogue with proponents of the linguistic turn such as Vernon and Joyce, has consistently and convincingly made the case for studying texts “in practice” and appreciating the “situated nature of expression” amid the constraints and inequalities faced by the various participants in a cultural field. Only then, he argues, do we glimpse meanings in the process of being made from those texts.Footnote 11 It matters, in other words, where, when, and by whom a song is sung, a cap hoisted, or a banner flown.
While this second approach has therefore come much closer to an understanding of songs as texts in performance, these scholars have nonetheless remained hesitant about integrating music into their analyses, particularly when compared to the brilliance with which visual symbols are explicated. Epstein, for instance, in an illuminating passage on the trials following the Peterloo massacre, details how the courts spent considerable energy discussing the tunes that were supposed to have been played at the meeting and their political resonances in order to determine the gathering's intent, subversive or otherwise. But this remarkable episode occupies no more than a couple of pages of a chapter otherwise wholly devoted to the manifold meanings of the cap of liberty.Footnote 12 Despite the evident merits of attention to the uses of music at events like Peterloo, the visual field retains priority, and we are forced to wonder what other insights into the aural aspects of political culture might result from more sustained attention. Moreover, in an approach that lists music and song alongside ribbons, flowers, effigies, caps, and other symbols, there can arise an implication of equivalence or interchangeability between cultural forms. This tendency is in part derived from the work of cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, in which all cultural forms are read as a unity, as clues to a single symbolic order underlying a particular culture.Footnote 13 While this approach has been of enormous importance in making deeper cultural analysis possible, it also presents problems. Music has properties that render it distinct as a cultural tool from textual, visual, or other media, properties that are discussed in more detail below. For now, it is enough to note that distortions as well as benefits are created by analyses that emphasize commonalities, rather than distinctions, between the many techniques through which people express their political desires.
These two approaches continue to form the bases of many historians’ attempts to account for music. Recently, however, a recognition of their limitations has sparked fresh analyses that are characterized by a focus on the act of making music (sung or otherwise) rather than on the music or text itself. Emphasis increasingly falls on how melodies and songs accrete meaning through successive acts of performance, on the flexibilities inherent in performance that can radically destabilize or profoundly alter a particular tune's meaning, and on the multiple meanings that any single musical performance possesses for its various participants. This move is symptomatic of what Peter Burke diagnoses as a broader turn toward performance on the part of historians: acts rather than texts become the central objects of study, while assumptions of cultural fixity are replaced by fluidity and clear expression by unstable negotiation of meaning.Footnote 14 This performance turn draws on parallel developments in musicology where the study of performance, as opposed to musical scores, has become increasingly important.Footnote 15 Much of this more recent work makes musical performance the central focus rather than simply one among many forms of symbolic expression, thus permitting a greater appreciation of the specific work performed by music as a medium.
A pioneering early example of this new work is Laura Mason's Singing the French Revolution, which fixes attention firmly on the act of performance. As Mason writes, “A song came fully to life only in being sung, for then the latitude for reinforcing, appropriating, and manipulating lyrics was enormous. Singers made songs their own with vocal inflections, gestures, and the particular circumstances under which they chose to sing. And audiences helped to shape a song's meaning by reacting to the singer's interpretation and expressing their own opinions with shouts and applause, or even another song.”Footnote 16 Putting such principles into practice, she traces—to give one example—the various performances of “Ça Ira” across the revolutionary period, detecting the ways in which its meanings hardened in certain performance contexts or became more fluid in others.Footnote 17 Indeed, this case study serves as a microcosm of Mason's broader argument: that not only were the events of the Revolution decisively shaped by song, but that song culture itself—the patterns of creation, performance, and reception that constituted it—was transformed and remade by revolutionary upheaval.
Mason's emphasis on the importance of performance has been echoed by subsequent work. Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering, and Emma Robertson, in their study of music in the workplace in Britain, make clear from the outset that they are “necessarily less interested in the songs that have been used at work as texts, and more interested in the ways in which these songs have been put to use, and what the singing of the songs has meant to workers.”Footnote 18 In the most sophisticated formations, the emphasis tends to fall not just on the act of singing but—drawing on the idea of the performative in the broadest sense—on all the forms of use to which music can be put. Thus in a recent study Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering argue, “It matters if music is read, played, sung or passively listened to—it has a different affective register—but it is never inert. Songbooks . . . are meaningless unless we catch them in the moment they are printed, transported, advertised, sold, given away, read, sung, played, disavowed, lost, stolen or thrown away.”Footnote 19 In this sense, music threads its way into multiple zones of activity, far beyond what might be considered stereotypical acts of music-making.
Perhaps the most significant feature of this recent work has been an insistence that music has carried meanings in its own right for its listeners, meanings that interact in a rich variety of ways with lyrics (if present). As Bowan and Pickering observe, “Melodic choices were often taken with great deliberation to evoke particular pasts; to connect the causes of the present to the struggles of the past.”Footnote 20 As a result, they argue, choice of melody—often strongly related to previous usages of that tune, as well as more pragmatic concerns—deserves equal attention to the patterns of echoes and parodies that characterize successive sets of song lyrics. The merits of such an approach are readily borne out by their analyses of the history of tunes, the varying uses to which they were put, and the sets of associations they gathered over time. What emerges is a picture of flexibility and malleability, but not of an infinite kind. Tracing performances of the “Marseillaise” over successive decades, for instance, Bowan and Pickering conclude that—despite the wide range of contexts in which it was performed—the melody “never lost its fundamental connection with the idea of liberty. Indeed, understood simultaneously as a patriotic hymn, in the sense of being a secular song of praise, and a bellicose song denoting the struggle for freedom, its meaning was not malleable and thus the overwhelming majority of its appropriations drew upon a shared understanding of the ideals of the French Revolution as expressed in the sound of its unmistakable tune. It was the performance of the melody—its sound—that provided the unshakeable link to the core idea of liberty.”Footnote 21 In other words, melodies and rhythms have a life of their own that needs to be taken into account. Moreover, while we should never lose sight of the flexibility of meanings inherent in any particular performance, neither are we confronted by a bewildering instability that defies satisfying analysis when patterns of musical use are considered in the aggregate and over longer periods of time.
An informed awareness of music also facilitates deeper recognition of how songs in particular work. Above all, the contours of a tune accentuate lyrics in ways that are lost when we simply read them as poetry. We miss, for instance, the repetition of lines and phrases, or the emphasis on a word through its elongation across several notes or its position at a melodic climax.Footnote 22 It is this conception of music and lyrics working together that Oskar Cox Jensen terms the “fitness” of a song, arguing that we need to bring “just a degree of aesthetically inflected consideration” to our analysis.Footnote 23 Cox Jensen is rightly cautious here, since the question of aesthetic “value” has proved one of the key points of dislocation when historians and musicologists enter into dialogue.Footnote 24 But for Cox Jensen, this endeavor is not about establishing some transhistorical conception of musical beauty but is rather an insistence on the need to think through how songs work as combined musical and textual phenomena and how this might in turn explain their reception by contemporaries.
These last points raise the vexed question of the need for musical literacy on the part of the scholar. Meeting this need is partly the reason that many of the latest works in the field have been the product of collaboration between musicologists and historians. Perhaps—in an age increasingly open to cross-disciplinary projects—such symbiotic partnerships may well represent a productive way forward. Certainly it would be foolish to deny that a degree of musical literacy, together with an awareness of the various musical genres in existence in the period of study, are useful tools for the historian interested in music. Since the response of contemporaries to a particular musical performance was inevitably influenced by their awareness of other forms and styles, and the varying cultural and social associations attached to them, our work of empathetic reconstruction of their world is undoubtedly aided by an ability to detect these musical differences.
It is easy to give too much importance to musical literacy, however, for if performance as a social phenomenon is our central object of study, the ability to read a score is only one part of the historian's task. Indeed, unless considerable effort is made to establish how that music might have been originally performed, through an investigation of historical performance conventions, instruments, spaces, and so on, attempts to play music from the past might be more misleading than illuminating. Furthermore, as has been mentioned above, the circumstances of performance shape in powerful ways the meaning of music for those involved. Consequently, few secure conclusions can be derived about the effect of music in the past simply from an examination or performance of the scores by themselves. Rather, they must be set alongside textual, visual, and material records of listening experiences if we are to access how those particular musical patterns animated the bodies and minds of contemporaries. Thus even historians with no ability to read music can make insightful contributions toward analyzing music's influence on past individuals and their actions, and all the more so if they work in dialogue with historical musicologists.
Understandably, historians are most comfortable among words—most of our professional training centers on textual analysis—and this focus can lead to a forgetfulness about the impact of our nonlinguistic encounters with the world and each other. Recent work has begun to mitigate this neglect by resisting the dominance of text, acknowledging the vital role played by tune choices in mediating the interpretation of songs, and reconstructing the dynamics of performance. By doing so, we come to appreciate the mutability of music's meanings as it is brought into resonant being in particular social contexts; and yet, as Bowan and Pickering astutely point out, these meanings are not endlessly unstable.Footnote 25 Patterns are discernible. Through a performance-centered analysis that accounts adequately for the meanings that contemporaries attached to music, whether associated with words or not, we can begin to build a fuller sense of the impact of music in the past.
Music and Politics
Having traced some of the challenges and potential solutions to accounting for music, the remainder of this introduction focuses on what the benefits of doing so might be within the field of political history, with an ear toward future research. Such benefits are worthy of scrutiny, for there is always a danger, amid the enthusiasm of attempting to develop a novel perspective on the past, of overstating the insights that it might bring. Dramatic pronouncements about a revolution in scholarship that will result from listening rather than looking at the past have been and are easily made,Footnote 26 yet experience should tell us that, for the most part, sensory stimuli work together and in harmony with one another. A warm breeze on the skin, the vibrant colors cast by bright sunshine, and a chorus of birdsong together create the impression of a summer's day. Consequently, we should not expect the results of a historical analysis of music and sound to be vastly disconnected from what can be known from other sources. That said, attending to music offers what is perhaps best described as a heightened awareness of certain aspects of experience that are intrinsic to the distinctive attributes of music as a medium and are thus more difficult to access through other means. To continue our metaphor, a warm sunny day without birdsong would be unnerving; the vigorous life and activity of summer would be missing. Music does, then, have important insights to offer in our attempt to understand all the dynamics of past political cultures.
Perhaps one of the most intuitive of these areas is music's impact upon the body. Almost all human cultures have used music for dance and for the coordination of manual labor; activities as diverse as sea shanties, military parades, and zumba all exploit music's ability to foster coordination among large groups. Herein lies a fundamental political use of music, not merely through facilitating the kinds of massed marching columns beloved of most modern states but also by drawing individuals more generally into a physical sense of unity with one another and with whoever (and in the age of amplification, whatever) is producing the music. It is one of the reasons why most political rallies feature at least some music. All these connections are on display in our opening passage from Martineau, in which the sound of the bugle creates a silence that we are surely meant to infer is also a physical stillness, while Eliza Flower's music for the “Union Hymn” is clearly reminiscent of contemporary march tunes, intended by the gathered singers as an aid to the flagging bodies of the Bromsgrove Unionists on the last stretch of their tramp to the rally ground. The significance lies not so much in the mere fact of the impact of this music on the bodies of those at Newhall Hill as in the form this impact took. Coordinated and spurred on by the march, and summoned into disciplined order by the bugle, the reformers were brought through the influence of this music to echo the bodily patterns of the military state, with all of its associations of discipline, patriotism, and loyalty. For a meeting whose chief message was precisely to question the legitimacy of the unreformed state, while being at pains to emphasize its members’ continuing allegiance to the constitution, there could be few better methods than to appropriate the embodied musical manifestations of state power, while radically overwriting them with a new message of liberty through the lyrics of the hymn.
Closely connected to these bodily responses is the link between music and emotion. There are no hard and fast rules here, for both emotions themselves and the notion of music's relationship to them are historically contingent. Nonetheless, the association of various forms of music with particular emotional states has been widely attested from the classical world onward. In many cases, this association was interwoven with political significance. In the late eighteenth century, as democratic revolutions swept through America and Europe, many of the old structures of political allegiance were dissolved and new ones created that increasingly rested on a primarily emotional identification with state and nation.Footnote 27 It is no coincidence that this era saw the emergence of national anthems, chosen (and just as often contested) precisely for their ability to summon certain emotional associations and identifications.Footnote 28 Once again, Martineau's account reflects this connection. She locates the primary effect of the “Union Hymn” as taking place “in the hearts of those who heard it” and imagines the “longing” it created among the soldiers of the Scots Greys. She goes on to describe the impact of the whole as “spirit-stirring.”Footnote 29 Of course, there are other ways of accessing the emotions of that day: we might read the accounts of speeches by the likes of Thomas Attwood (and pay particular attention to the frequently noted responses of the crowd to his words), or behold the dramatic gestures of the speakers in Benjamin Haydon's painting of the occasion. But it is surely significant that when Martineau wanted to express how it felt to be there, she foregrounded the effect of the music, with almost no mention of the speeches and only a glancing impression of the sight of the gathering. Clearly, for her, the music was the most effective means of achieving one of the meeting's chief purposes: to capture the emotional allegiance of the populace for the cause of reform.
These insights music affords us into how the body and the emotions are imbricated with politics are especially timely because historians are increasingly concerned with the unconscious or half-conscious aspects of political culture. If our main sources are speeches and newspapers, we can all too easily reduce politics to a textual, cerebral affair of the conscious mind. But alongside such approaches, there is room for a deeper understanding of the bodily rhythms and emotional states that inform political outlooks, the things that create our sense of a well-ordered (or disordered) world, and the consequent desirability of change in ways of which we might only be half aware.Footnote 30 Music, as a tool for engendering and influencing these states of being, thus acquires a powerful value for those seeking to sway the populace toward sympathy with their stance.
Another theme that has been steadily rising up the agenda of humanities scholars is that of space and place, the political significance of which is clearly apparent.Footnote 31 Music and sound have begun to be integrated into the spatial turn, most obviously for their ability to mark out and claim possession of contested space. There are numerous instances, historical or otherwise, of political protest movements engaging in sonic battles over space with rival groups or the authorities, music frequently acting as a proxy for (and in some cases a precursor to) violence.Footnote 32 Just as important, however, is sound's penetrative quality, a property it shares with smells, marking out both as distinct from vision. Sound—admittedly with distortions—travels round corners, can be heard at considerable distance and beyond sight of its source, and can cross barriers such as walls and windows, making it very difficult to find spaces insulated from high-decibel sounds. Nor is it easy to avoid its impact on the body, for where one can shut one's eyes, blocking up ears is both difficult and only partially effective, for at its loudest, sound makes the very bones and sinews of the body vibrate. Not by chance has sound been transformed into a weapon of war and a form of torture.Footnote 33 The specific case of music adds another layer, for it makes it possible to broadcast a particular message or identity (or at least attempt to do so) through a favored song or air into spaces that might otherwise be impossible to reach. This is one reason why no political procession worth its salt, past or present, can do without some form of music. Indeed, as Martineau hints in the case of the Scots Greys sealed in their barracks waiting for the Iron Duke's orders on that May day in 1832, this technique might prove vital to the very survival of the protest group. Space, then, takes its place alongside the body and emotions as a key site of political contestation to which a consideration of music seems essential.
Of particular interest to historians, perhaps, are the processes and patterns of memory, and here too music proves to be an intriguing resource. Music and memory interact on several levels. Schoolteachers, as much as political activists, will attest to the power of music as an aid to memory; words set to music flow more easily from the mind to the tongue. Moreover, as the brain declines in dementia patients, musical memory is one of the last things to be lost, while many people share the commonplace experience of a piece of music or a song recalling an earlier phase of life or emotional state. (Here we find our thematic threads overlapping.) Indeed, we might posit that, precisely as a result of the connections with the body and emotion outlined above, moments of musical participation, especially in the context of political excitement, represent episodes of heightened experience that etch themselves into the mind and stand out in the memory of the event, even if other details are lost. Martineau, after all, was certain that the sound of that performance of the “Union Hymn” had “never died away in the hearts of those who heard it,” and describing it evidently remained, for her, essential to a historical remembrance of those turbulent days.Footnote 34
These four themes—the body, emotion, space, and memory—seem to be areas of the history of political life to which an awareness of music, because of its intrinsic and distinctive properties, might make a particular contribution. All are richly in evidence in the essays that constitute this forum. Nonetheless, these themes are far from comprehensive or prescriptive and are simply offered in the spirit of developing a conversation about fruitful areas for future research. Before I finish, however, I want to draw attention to a final, overarching point about the ethical value ascribed to music and its consequent political implications. Music, in everyday parlance, is often classed as a universally good thing, and frequently labeled—with varying degrees of poignancy and bombast—one of the highest achievements of human civilization and an exceptionally powerful means by which human beings might express something of the beauty and tragedy of their lives. Consequently, the act of making music is often heard as a powerful sign of presence and agency. Silence, meanwhile, is frequently linked with discipline, repression, and constraint and thus associated with powerlessness. Such characterizations contain some truth, but the prestige and expressive power ascribed to music does not mean that all acts of music-making should be read as forms of liberation. Such is the unfortunate, and I think often unintentional, implication of several recent studies that focus on music as a tool of those seeking to challenge existing power structures.Footnote 35 Of course, making music can be an act of freedom and a potent vehicle for generating solidarity. But it can also be an act of coercion and a mechanism of exclusion. Moments of performance, by their very nature, generate in-groups and out-groups, performers and listeners, those familiar and those unacquainted with that musical language, style, or idiom.Footnote 36 For all Martineau's claim that the “Union Hymn” was “then familiar to every child in the land,”Footnote 37 it is nonetheless inescapably redolent in form and style of the music found within the middle-class, radical, dissenting culture of its creators. As such, we might conjecture that its performance at the meeting helped to bolster the far from uncontentious power of the middle-class leadership of the reform movement and may have further underlined the subordination of working-class members and their interests. There is a need, therefore, to be more attentive to exploring the other side of this story: to music as a form of constraint, channeling people into patterns of life that suit existing power structures; and, in its more extreme form, to music's use by authorities to drown out the voices of radical challenge.
The essays in this forum explore all of these themes and more. In a variety of ways, they continue the discussion and development of new methodologies in this emerging field, always retaining a desire to grasp what music has meant for contemporaries and how it made them think, feel, and act. In doing so, they reconstruct more fully those nontextual and nonvisual aspects of human communication in the past that have struggled to survive in our archives, and advance further a consideration of political engagement as a multi-sensory experience resting on a complex web of bodily and psychological responses. If, ultimately, our perspective on this frustratingly, gloriously evanescent thing called music is necessarily partial and incomplete, it is nonetheless vital to capture the impressions left by the echoes of the past. Only then might we—like those members of the Society of Friends memorialized by Martineau—come to “know something of the power of music.”Footnote 38
